Xorg 3D acceleration for neomagic

Alex Deucher alexdeucher at gmail.com
Sat Aug 12 14:03:03 PDT 2006


On 8/12/06, Kacper Wysocki <kacperw at online.no> wrote:
> While I am on the subject of the neomagic driver (and anyone who's
> read this far must be at least remotely interested in it), I'm
> *positive* that I found a driver with decent 3D acceleration for the
> neomagic chip, some odd years ago. (By decent I mean armagetron and
> glxgears worked without being choppy). A harddrive corruption later I
> could no longer find these drivers.
>
> In recent years I heard that Red Hat took over development of the
> neomagic driver, and my hope was that accelerated rendering would
> finally be implemented. Alas, the most recent post out there about
> neomagic quotes a developer as saying that the chip was so slow it's
> dubious whether acceleration would make any difference. It *does* make
> a difference, and increases the usefulness of aging hardware.
>
> Does anyone on this list know what happened to the 3D support in
> neomagic? Or maybe what it would take to get 3D support implemented in
> the driver, or who has the specs necessary?


As  far as I know there was never a 3D driver for the neomagic chips.
Even the 2D driver was binary only for a while.  Only the later
neomagic chips had a 3d engine, and even that was pretty limited.  I
believe redhat or precision insight wrote the 2D driver.  neomagic
never gave out any specs as far as I know.  I don't know if anyone
outside of neomagic has teh specs anymore.  Xv support in the driver
was developed via reverse engineering.  You'll probably have to do the
same for 3D.

Alex

>
> TIA,
>   -Kacper



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