RE: [Dri-devel] [OT]ATI GL4

[Alexander S. <Ale...@at...>]

The ATI Fire GL 4 is based on the IBM GXT chip series.
To all my knowledge IBM produced that high performance
grafics chip for their AIX based server and workstation 
machines with IBM board design. Further there is the
FireGL board (the responsible high end group that is now 
at ATI and was formely at SPEA, Diamond, S3 and SonicBlue)
due to an exclusive technology contract for the PC market
which covered Windows and Linux targets.
 
The chipset documentation was not made public untill today.
There is no indication to me that this will change one times.

The closed source drivers for Linux are pretty nice and do
have a remarkably high level of reliability plus a professional 
level of support for board owner and ISVs due to the pricing of 
the board. The boards are in use with Linux for a higher
number of comercial engineering and scientific applications.
The major digital content creation programs are well supported
and general programs like vmware 3.x and the usual magazine
benchmark suites and benchmark shooters do run nicely with
those drivers. Run Maya with it, tryout softimage 3D or XSI, 
get hands on MSC-Patran or look how Houdini does perform and
then get convinced about this Linux drivers.

<spam> 
see this link on how nice the FireGL4 performs
in the HP x4000 computer system. Of course the
board is the default board for this machine.
The Conclusion section says it all, 
i dont have to quote it here.

http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5945
</spam>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nils Olofsson [mailto:ni...@ca...]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 11:38
> To: dri...@li...
> Subject: [Dri-devel] [OT]ATI GL4
> 
> 
> Hi i was just wondering about the state of driver for the ATI 
> GL4 on linux.
> Ati have released driver for this and i was just wondering if 
> anyone has
> used this cards with the ati drivers. Or is there open source driver
> avaible that is up to the task of running maya?.
> Any sugestions welcome.
> Nils