Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 20, 2005 12:44 AM
Matrox has a history of both supporting open source driver development and providing proprietary drivers for the GNU/Linux platform. The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) currently supports all Matrox Millennium G series graphics cards that use an AGP interface. Unfortunately, the new G550 PCI Express (PCIe) edition will not be able to perform any hardware-accelerated 3D rendering. Matrox spokesman Serge Bohdjalian says, "It turns out that the DRI portion of the driver was originally designed for AGP. As a result there are hardware dependencies with the AGP architecture (specifically, with the way bus mastering is handled). In theory, the driver can be made to support PCI and PCIe by the open source community, but this isn't a trivial task.
This again shows that people at Matrox have no idea what's happening in the open source community. DRI _does_ support PCI cards. The support is quite new though so I'm not sure how much testing it has received. One downside with PCI cards is the lack of hardware scatter-gather support which means that you can't use textures directly from system RAM. However due to the limited bandwith of the PCI bus system RAM textures would be quite slow anyway.
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DRI does support PCI cards
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 20, 2005 12:44 AMThis again shows that people at Matrox have no idea what's happening in the open source community. DRI _does_ support PCI cards. The support is quite new though so I'm not sure how much testing it has received. One downside with PCI cards is the lack of hardware scatter-gather support which means that you can't use textures directly from system RAM. However due to the limited bandwith of the PCI bus system RAM textures would be quite slow anyway.
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