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[News] No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the MediatorANN.lu
Posted on 14-Oct-2000 10:01 GMT by Ben Yoris111 comments
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In a recent press release, DCE announces an exclusive contract with the CGFX team for Voodoo3 drivers. These drivers will now be committed to the G-Rex PCI busboard. This contract seems to be an alliance against the Mediator PCI busboard from Elbox. More details.
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 101 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by TIAMK on 16-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 85 (Amifan):
Hey Amifan,
why should you buy something from DCE.
Become happy with your fantastic Apollo 66 Mhz scrap.
Happy Guru
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 102 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Electric Head on 17-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 99 (Johan Rönnblom):
Fair enough, good points there. However, personally I would class the act of company 'A' (allegedly) inhibiting development of
company 'B's product, as a much more severe crime as a company 'B' asking a specific supplier of their product to stop advertising
company 'A's similar product . A lot of the hardware that Eyetech stocks / promotes for example, isn't stocked / promoted by Power
Computing. If you get what I mean :) Anyway, just my opinion.
And TIAMK.. what does someones personal choice of accelerator have to do with any of this??
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 103 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Johan Rönnblom on 17-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 102 (Electric Head):
Well, now there's an interview with Frank Mariak on http://www.amiga-news.de/archiv/001018.shtml
which as expected gives a rather different picture. I'm tired now and
my german isn't that good, but as far as I understand it, he says
there is nothing that would stop Eyetech or Elbox from licensing the
Voodoo driver. What would be "exclusive" about the license I don't
know, perhaps that this would give the owner of the license exclusive
rights to distribute the driver, rather than releasing it for free?
He also points out that he has given Elbox a free Virge
driver, and that the development of the Voodoo driver was done on the
G-REX prototype, not on Elbox' hardware. He says that he has had an
agreement with DCE for a long time, and admits that the time to go
public with the agreement was badly chosen.
I'd be interested to know a bit more about this contract/agreement
between Mariak and Elbox. It seems to me that while Elbox seem to
think of it as some critical contract, Mariak sees it more as an
agreement to attempt a cooperation, a cooperation that was only
partially successful (1 driver out of 2 completed).
As for the technical problems, he (again) clarifies that there is no
technical problem as long as only one CPU is used at a time.
Now I need some sleep, again I really regret that people are so quick
to condemn the few remaining Amiga developers. Ok, so what if I'm
wrong, what if DCE/VDF are really evil people, and it takes me another
week before I realize this? What have I lost? Nothing. But what if
that is not the truth, and this is a common disagreement where people
have made mistakes and bad decisions but nothing really serious? Then
the people who are so quick to condemn have hurt what remains of the
Amiga, completely unnecessarily.
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 104 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Juergen Schober on 17-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 93 (Ralph Schmidt):
No I won't do that. But if one is interested I could release the EGS codes
(well, I am not sure if I am allowed to to this, though I think I could at least
release the driver..if I find it somewhere), but that is not the real question.
Point is, EGS gives you a very abstract OO view on that subject. I
would call this "serialization" of gfx data, which see's the gfx bus just
as a scalable interface - no matter how it works (the faster the better, sure).
But if (game) programmers would realize that, one could do a lot more...
BTW: We've been so proud of Amigas Blitter/Copper, and now we say
we need direct memory access, or it won't work. How does this fit into our POV?
The same goes for 3D data. Don't now how Warp3D handles this, but
one should see it abstract from the programming POV, or do you tell
me that OpenGL _applications_ write into VMem ? (Maybe DirectX does but
that is another story...).
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 105 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Johan Rönnblom on 17-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 104 (Juergen Schober):
This is really a moot point on this subject. Regardless of whether one
thinks apps "should" write directly to the framebuffer (I'd say they
should if it's the most efficient method, which it sometimes is), it
is a fact that game programmers do this and they require this to work.
A driver which doesn't support it is simply not good enough.
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 106 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Olivier Fabre on 17-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 105 (Johan Rönnblom):
As far as I know, when hardware 3D rendering is used in a game (or a demo),
2D stuff is also rendered in 3D (rotating the surface so that it faces the
camera).
So the apps are not rendering directly into the frame buffer..
(But I'm not sure if I understood correctly what you are talking about)
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 107 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Amifan on 18-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 87 (StormLord):
Yes, I do respect all the work of Phase5, I brought their accelerators (from a Blizzard030/50 to a BlizzardPPC). But after the PUP-WOS they lost some credit. The guy who always wanted the last word in this war was Ralph Schmidt. I think his proud was hurt when someone said that HIS implementation could be done better (WarpOS was born).
Now there's a compagny who did (apparently) the impossible to create a PCI busboard for ALL a1200s.
P5 is dead.
In this comments you can see clearly that Ralph is speaking "with a DCE tongue".
That he THINKS with DCE in mind is understandible because they continue the P5 line of products.
Now with all those connections, he isn't in the possition to comment on other PCI implementations which can concurrent with the developements of his former compagny.
Maybe what he says is true, maybe not.
But look at the facts.
there's a virgeDX pci driver (ok it's 4MB only)
There's a working voodoo3 alpha driver. (want it?? mail me :)))
Elbox announced a working TV card driver (44MB/s sustained transfer rate over the PCI bus to the gfx card) and sound driver.
You can says that what they officially announce will become reality.
They produce a voodoo3 themselves. Set release date. 2 weeks from now.
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 108 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Amifan on 18-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 90 (Kay Are Ulvestad):
Hey, I'm a technician, actually a HW engineer. we always think difficult while there's an easy solutions. Going the hard way gives you more credit when you find the solution :))
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 109 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Amifan on 18-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 101 (TIAMK):
Read again stupid.
I OWN a BLIZZARDPPC. How else do I know it's limitations by doing a bustest.
And for the Apollo060/66. I got my knowledge by a demonstration of elbox on the amiga stand on Computer98 in germany.
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 110 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Juergen Schober on 18-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 105 (Johan Rönnblom):
Well, these sort of replies show that I am right. I did not say, "you
must not write into vmem" (if this is possible), but it is not up to the
programmer to decide this.
You have an abstraction in any way (called render engine ;) which will adopt
to the HW. If this allows direct access, fine, else do it in another way. So
a programmer doesn't define the needs of a customer, it goes the other
way round. And if there is a demand, one should think how a solution
could be worked out. At least the differnce will be in speed and the customer
will decide any way...(but believe me, you won't notice the difference - in
real world - if you have a good OO core!)
No CGFX Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator : Comment 111 of 111ANN.lu
Posted by Johan Rönnblom on 18-Oct-2000 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 110 (Juergen Schober):
Juergen Schober wrote:
: So a programmer doesn't define the needs of a customer, it goes the
: other way round.
Correct. And in this case, the customer is the game programmer. As a
driver programmer, it doesn't matter if people "should" use OO
abstractions for their render engines. Of course they should. But
that's not your problem, that's their problem. Your problem is to
deliver a driver that does what the developers expect, and whether
they are right or not is irrelevant.
Of course, you can make a driver that doesn't support direct
framebuffer access. But a lot of developers (and thus users, who can't
use programs from these developers with your driver) will then think
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