29 Nov
2004
29 Nov
'04
4:52 a.m.
On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 00:15 -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:
For a sound card, it's easy. James Courtier-Dutton reverse engineered
the Audigy LS in a few days. But a 3D driver is literally like rocket
science. It's _hard_. This was discussed on the "open source graphics"
thread on LKML. The consensus was that it's essentially impossible.
Lee
When I start
to understand the registers that a piece of hardware
makes visible I start to understand the architecture of the product
itself. If NVidia believes has an advantage over ATI in some area then
possibly ATI would copy that and improve their performance. Neither
company probably knows the intimate details of the inner workings of
the other company's chips and hence thinks they have the advantage.
is it really that hard to reverse engineer the binary only driver?
Does it make any real world difference for competitors? (my guess it
that it makes no difference and that companies are either fooling
themselves or just don't want to bother with legalities of releasing
info parts of which might be owned by other companies etc.)