[geeks] Re: [rescue] An interesting problem

[Klaasjan Brand]

On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 06:18, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> I use AccelX because my experience with XFree has been that its Matrox
> support -- particularly its accelerated Matrox support -- has
> historically sucked ass.  Because Xi Graphics doesn't distribute source,
> they can get the full specs from Matrox that let them work the hardware
> much harder.

The specs of the g400-series adapters have been available for download
on the matrox site for a few years now.

> This is undoubtedly less of an issue on chipsets for which full specs
> are available without an NDA, or which have been thoroughly
> reverse-engineered.  Byt my experience is XFree's Matrox support just
> isn't really all the way there.

IMO it's more a problem of not having enough people who have enough
experience to make the drivers perfect... it look like working on 3d
drivers required a lot of knowledge of 3d graphics and hardware
rendering pipelines.
The most recent open source 3d drivers (xfree ati r200) have not been
created by the community, but by paid professionals. After they quit
working on it only minor bugs have been fixed. The OpenGL display
quality and/or rendering speed have not really increased...

Klaasjan