[geeks] Jesus this guy could be me

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 11:01:31PM +0100, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> On Saturday 18 January 2003 22:46, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > Open hardware?  Who the hell makes anything reasonably resembling an
> > open 3D accelerator?  Certainly not ATI, Nvidia, or Matrox.  Or the
> > people who make that Kyro card.  Who makes an open video IO card (well,
> > Linux Media Labs makes a rather mediocre one that they price gouge you
> > on). About the only open hardware is SCSI and ethernet, and stuff where
> > the chip maker will sell the chips to anyone so it wasn't too hard to
> > reverse engineer the rest.
> 
> Nothing is perfect in this world, but I'm still getting acceleration with 
> fairly recent ati cards (8500 radeon) while no one will be able to the same 
> for an nvidia card. Well not with opensource drivers at least. 
> And Matrox is notorious among linux users for its good opensource support. 

I haven't seen much good support for a Matrox card for 3D acceleration
since the G200.  Perhaps I'm not up to date in this area.

I actually would love to get a few G200s in PCI configurations, just
because they are so well documented.

I haven't heard particularly good things about the open source radeon
drivers, but I keep hoping that that will change.  At the moment the
Weather Channel seems to be sponsering development, but I haven't heard
anything about T&L support.

The old RivaTNT drivers seemed fairly decent to me.  But, just
supporting a rasterizer is a lot easier than supporting a T&L system I guess.
 
> Who are Linux Media Labs? :-)

http://www.linuxmedialabs.com/

They make the LML33 which is an MJPEG board that is to my understanding
somewhat related to the Iomega Buz or the Pinnacle DC10+.  Except they
charge a lot more than the other two go for.  They now have a LML33R10
board.  I'm not sure what the difference is other than it is less than
half the cost, but still not particularly cost competitive compared to
the others.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd