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How about the "rest" ?How about the "rest" ?Posted Sep 5, 2007 17:00 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: How about the "rest" ? by mathias Parent article: AMD to open up graphics specs
As far as I understand it there isn't any hardware in this chipset dedicated to 2D acceleration or video acceleration. They're just considered special cases of the existing, very fast programmable 3D rendering pipeline.
If AMD provide the information needed to /properly/ set up the CRTCs (or rather their modern equivalent) and do memory management, which are both needed to have a correct "2D driver" on such hardware, then we've actually got almost everything it can do except 3D. The rest is mostly information on how to program the shaders, and quirks, known bugs etc. that save a lot of wasted time debugging problems.
The same is true for modern nVidia chipsets too. It's just not worth wasting transistors on a specialised feature like the old overlay and scaler features used in Xv video acceleration when you've got a programmable engine that can do the same things, or a million subtle variations just as easily.
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