Re: why no open source driver for NVIDIA/ATI

[Roland S. <rsc...@hi...>]

Patrick McFarland wrote:
> On Wednesday 27 July 2005 04:54 pm, Ian Romanick wrote:
> 
>>Patrick McFarland wrote:
>>
>>>Even if we violate precision/range stuff, being able to accelerate
>>>simplistic shaders would be quite useful. Its better than not having a
>>>software implementation of the shader pipeline.
>>
>>The problem is that most shaders that use ARB_fp or NV_fp aren't
>>simplistic enough.  It would be a *lot* of work to benefit 1% of
>>real-world shaders.
> 
> 
> I think ATI really screwed R200 owners then. The shader pipeline ultimately is 
> useless.
Erm, I think you're asking a bit too much for a card of this generation. 
It's not like you could do it on a GF3, for example...
The only way a card of that generation would have been able to do such 
future unknown functionality is if the fragment pipeline would have been 
a lot more generic - but then again it probably would have been too slow 
to be really useful, not to mention the longer your program, the more 
you'll be hurting from lack of precision generally.
And, I wouldn't say it's really useless. There ARE some apps out there 
which indeed can make use of it quite well (doom3 for example, there are 
quite some directx applications out there which use the equivalent in 
directx (ps 1.4) too).

Roland