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3D overload3D overloadPosted Dec 1, 2009 11:58 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: 3D overload by eru Parent article: Between Fedora 12 and 13
2D is just a special case of 3D with very boring matrices. The "2D acceleration" in older chips tended to mean acceleration of the Windows GDI functions, whereas at least "3D acceleration" is more generally applicable stuff.
AMD/ATI do make a chip with no 3D features, they sell it for inclusion in rack servers which they rightly theorise will be connected to an LCD panel for maybe 5 minutes if they're being installed by someone who is new to the business and doesn't have a reliable network based auto-installer yet. It has basically the same framebuffer setup and so on as their 3D chips, just no 3D. I would not be surprised to discover that this is actually just as expensive to make, and is done purely because 3D drivers are notoriously complicated, therefore unreliable and no-one wants their web server crashed with an Oops message saying the 3D rendering engine lost an interrupt. Not providing the hardware is a 100% effective way to prevent people installing unreliable 3D drivers on their server.
If you're able to convince business PC makers that these framebuffer-only chips are the Right Thing for corporate desktops, you may be onto something. But I suspect that with e.g. Excel and Powerpoint already taking advantage of the 3D acceleration, you won't get much traction.
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3D overload Posted Dec 3, 2009 20:38 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] We have older servers with the ATI Rage XL, and middle-aged servers with the ATO ES1000. I once ran X on the ES1000, and X recognized it as a Radeon 7000 or somesuch. We have free accelerated 3D drivers for the Radeon 7000. IIRC I even tried 3D, and it worked.BTW, normally we run our servers in text mode, not for fear of getting an oops from the 3D driver (if the X server crashes, we don't care), but because we only need the console when we boot the thing, and when it does not react to the network. And then we want to see what the kernel said on the console, and X having blanked the screen or displaying anything but the console is not very helpful.
3D overload Posted Dec 5, 2009 1:29 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
I once ran X on the ES1000, and X recognized it as a Radeon 7000 or somesuch. We have free accelerated 3D drivers for the Radeon 7000. IIRC I even tried 3D, and it worked.
I guess everybody has their memory play tricks on them sometimes. The ES1000 has no 3D capability. If you don't believe me you might read ATI's specifications for it, or the source of the free driver you're talking about.
3D overload Posted Dec 16, 2009 19:03 UTC (Wed) by daenzer (✭ supporter ✭, #7050) [Link]
> The ES1000 has no 3D capability.
Actually, at least initially the 3D hardware was there, just not validated during production (probably that's cheaper than actually removing the hardware). So with luck it might work at least to some degree, but if it breaks you get to keep both pieces. The X.Org radeon driver currently disables all functionality using 3D hardware by default on these cards but it can be enabled via xorg.conf options for giggles (the extremely low video memory bandwidth probably precludes any non-trivial 3D usage anyway).
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