Nvidia support

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 9:41 AM -0500 5/10/02, Robert Brandtjen wrote:
>On Friday 10 May 2002 03:48 am, Bruno Mery wrote:
>>  I am also unable to get the 'nv' driver working correctly.
>
>It's possible alot of the problems you all are having is that the Mac cards
>don't have the same support for graphics features the PC versions have -
>simply put, the Mac versions are dumbed down.

Nonsense, the Mac versions are identical.

>Even the newest Geforce 4 in the
>high end Macs are really just Geforce 2's - if you go to a compusa or what
>have you, You'll see what I mean, you can buy a Geforce 4 for a $100.00 or
>so, but it's not a real one, it's just a made over Geforce2 chipset with
>substantially downgraded features from even a Geforce 2 ti.

You're talking about the 4MX, not the 4.  The 4MX is a 2MX core 
clocked faster (not a sped up 2, that's why the features are 
different / lesser than the 2).  You have NVidia's marketing 
department to thank for that silliness.

Apple has a 4MX card *and* a 4 in their lineup.  Both are the same as 
what you get when you buy a PC card of the same name.  In fact, Apple 
used configurations similar if not identical to top-of-the-line PC 
cards in both cases.  The only fly in the ointment is that they've 
had to delay shipping their GeForce 4 card for some reason (logically 
this is probably NVidia's fault, since Apple doesn't design OEM video 
cards, they give the OEM the specs they want and let 'em rip).

>THe NV driver set is most likely set up to take advantage of the chipset for
>the PC version cards and cannot really "see" your cards.
>
>Thank Apple for that one.

Robert, you really need to stop this stupid "blame Apple for 
absolutely everything" BS that you like to push on this mailing list 
whenever you can.  I realize that you're bitter that Apple didn't 
fulfill your every desire, but it gets old.

It certainly doesn't help people solve their problems.  This guy has 
a 2MX, and you go off on some grossly mistaken rant about GeForce4 
just because you want to slam Apple a bit?

 From some searching on the web, it sounds like the XFree86 nv driver 
didn't even support DVI output until 4.2.0.  And the 4.2.0 release 
notes say:

"The NVIDIA nv driver now has preliminary powerpc support for the 
NV11 and NV20."

(NV11 = GeForce2MX)

So we're looking at a new feature of the driver, plus the driver as a 
whole has only recently been cleaned up for bigendian machines like 
powerpc.  Recently enough that the authors are only willing to count 
it as 'preliminary'.  I don't think it's too surprising that problems 
can arise with immature drivers.

-- 
Tim Seufert