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R&B

Have you provided bigfoot the hardware/driver specs ?

Ain't the drivers opensource?

Quote from the site

"So, the big question: how much of this will be open source? The answer: most of it, but we have to build the 3D stuff and release those as binaries to keep the IP owners happy."

Quote:

AFAIK, (most) of the 2D part is available as open source, but not 3D. But it doesn't matter however, since Genesi has complete and full access to everything closed source as well!

BTW, Just for comparison, here is a chart describing how XGI performs compared to ATI and nVidia:

xgi-positioning.png

As you see, this test is quite old, and all mentioned card are a bit low-end by todays standard when it comes to 3D, but the range of cards fits nicely within Genesi's scope here IMHO, and the ability to have full documentation, driver and support for the whole range of GPU's from the manufacturer is a great thing! The (upcoming?) PCI Express x16 Volari XP10 is not listed here.


For more info, here is some collected quotes of Pieter Van den Abeele taken from PPCZone:

"For the Efika we are going with a V3XT from XGI, either ASIC or board - a single board solution still has to be validated. That V3XT card is low profile and uses only a heatsink so it fits in an ODW as well. I have also successfully used the V8 in an ODW. We will probably upgrade the HMC to the V8.

For the OSW I'm looking at the V10 PCI-Express. Genesi has a partnership with XGI and I ported their proprietary 3D driver to PowerPC. We have the source code for it and we have register-level documentation for the entire range of XGI graphic cards, allowing us to ship systems which have optimal 2D and 3D graphics on board."

"Some facts:

- XGI cards have an mpeg decoder on board which works on PPC linux

- XGI cards have great deinterlacing features (5-field motion and edge adaptive deinterlacing), component out, High-Def (1080i) support even in the lower-end cards. These features are not found on either ATI or Nvidia cards.

- Linux has few applications which can take advantage of the really advanced (and expensive) features found in state of the art Nvidia and ATI cards ( think SLI ). On PPC Linux, 3D ( think XGL, OpenGl games ) is important, but features such as SLI are simply not needed at this time. Afaik they cannot even be used on x86 linux.

- XGI makes very affordable power-efficient graphics chips and 2D-only chips as well ( which is important for our embedded partners )

- XGI has open sourced the 2D part of its driver and does not require the community to reverse engineer its cards. Various of our Efika developers have received register-level documentation already."

"Right now we have agreed with XGI to do the following:

- The 2D part (most of it is already in the linux kernel) is open source. This means you can download a vanilla linux kernel, put an XGI card in your ODW, OSW, HMC or Efika and HAL/OF will initialize the card, openfirmware will be able to use your card and you'll have a 2D linux console and X console.

- The 3D part is currently not open source. That means that if you want state of the art 3D stuff, you'll have to use a binary driver we provide for you. On the longer term there is a possibility that this 3D driver will be open sourced as well, but, unfortunately, I cannot pin a date on that yet. XGI is thinking about all possible scenarios.

If you are a HAL/OF customer, or you want to make a driver for that super-OS you're developing, we can help you by providing documentation, a so-called software programmers guide or a design kit and we can proxy for you with XGI.

What we cannot do is give you the source code for the current driver, to be included as GPL in for instance X.org. The reason is not that we don't want to do that but that were asked not to ( for now ) and we respect XGI wishes in that regard. However, if you think you can improve the XGI driver, we can work something out (maybe an internship where you get to show XGI your skills).

I would love to have your input on how we should organize this (better). If you have ideas, feedback, disagree, agree, please put it in an email and send it to me. I'll discuss good ideas with XGI and who knows what happens."

Regarding XGI drivers for MorphOS:

"As far as I know, nobody is working on this. It would probably make a fun MorphOS project, but I don't have the time to do it. I also don't know how much work this would be from a MorphOS point of view, a MorphOS developer can probably tell you more about their 3D graphics framework and the engineering effort required to port a driver such as the one we have for Linux."


[ Edited by takemehomegrandma on 2006/5/19 15:00 ]

@TMHG

That is a very good post. Thank you for collecting all the comments.

There are a couple of key sentences in the blog:

1. We will release sources/binaries under a license compatible with the targeted operating system.

2. However, if you need documents or access to the source code, we can arrange that.

Pieter will be working with Ralph and Frank first and we will see where it can go from there. Certainly, bigfoot and kiero will eventually have access. The challenge will be to get the cards out to where they need to be. We are working on volume pricing with XGI now.

R&B

I cant wait to see this thing in action! Its starting to look so nice!

Forgive me for being dense, but does this announcment mean that more modern video cards will be supported in MOS?

Would be nice to drop a Radeon 9600 in the Peg II. :)

No it doesn't. Only when the MOS Team says so.

There are a few problems here, even assuming that the MOS Team do get
the needed information. First of all, are there any available cards
with these GFX chips? It's not much use having drivers for
something that people can't get.


[ Edited by merko on 2006/5/19 17:31 ]

Quote:

Translated to the topic of this thread - what you mean is: "Would be nice to drop a XGI Volari V5 Ultra in the Peg II", right?

[ Edited by takemehomegrandma on 2006/5/19 18:25 ]

My post pointed out that I was uncertain what the topic of the thread is. If we're talking about support for XGI cards, so be it. I've never heard of XGI before today, but I did read an article dated March of this year that ATI bought them.


Quote:

I'm no so sure about XGi futur ... look at what happen to 3DFX and many more...
But I will be a very happy customer if it works

Quote:
Also remember the issue of which gfx cards actually physically fit in Pegasos 2. Afaik, that isn't the case with 9600. Don't know if it could work, if it would fit.

Of course the fact that it doesn't fit also means that it wouldn't work even if it would fit - different voltage or something...

Quote:

From what I read, that was just a rumour!

What is interesting though is what ATI plans to do with the companies it actually did acquire, like Terayon, a cable modem developer.

If ATI were to develop low power SoC that included graphics, video decoder, tv tuner AND cable modem.. that would be incredibly useful.

If you have one of those bulky Terayon cable modem on your desk, you know what I mean