Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S270639AbUJUCIb (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:08:31 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S270729AbUJUCDv (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:03:51 -0400 Received: from mx3.sover.net ([209.198.87.173]:2251 "EHLO mx3.sover.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S270639AbUJUCAQ (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:00:16 -0400 Message-ID: <4177185A.9080708@sover.net> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:00:58 -0400 From: Stephen Wille Padnos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jon Smirl CC: Timothy Miller , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable? References: <4176E08B.2050706@techsource.com> <9e4733910410201808c0796c8@mail.gmail.com> <9e473391041020181150638b4@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <9e473391041020181150638b4@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2029 Lines: 48 Jon Smirl wrote: >Another thought, TV out is important in the embedded market. Think >about Tivo/MythTV/set top boxes. > OK - so the answer seems to be "if it does the right things, then it may sell" It's hard to sell a card that doesn't do good 3D these days (re: Matrox Parhelia). Speaking of the parhelia, I would look at that feature set as a starting point. 10-bit color, multiscreen accelerated 3D, dual DVI, gamma corrected glyph antialiasing, etc. So, let's try to figure out the right feature set. (that is what was originally asked for, after all) Looking at 2D, I would definitely want to see: (some taken from other emails on the subject) alpha blending antialiasing (related to alpha blending) bitblt fast primitive drawing accelerated offscreen operations more than 8 bits/color channel video output - preferably with independent scale / refresh (ie, clone the 100Hz 1600x1200 monitor on a 648x480 60 Hz NTSC monitor) video decoding acceleration (possibly some encoding functions as well) bitmap scaling (think of font sizing and the like) 2D rotation possibly 2.5D rotation - ie, the perspective "twist" of a plane image into 3D space (like Sun's Looking Glass environment) I would think that a chip that has a lot of simple functions, but requires the OS to put them together to actually do something, would be great. This would be the UNIX mentality brought to hardware: lots of small components that get strung together in ways their creator(s) never imagined. If there can be a programmable side as well (other than re-burning the FPGA), that would be great. I guess I would look at this as an opportunity to make a "visual coprocessor", that also has the hardware necessary to output to a monitor (preferably multiple monitors). - Steve - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/