NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/comp/sys/ibm/pc/hardware/37451

Text File | 1993-01-28 | 1.6 KB | 31 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Path: sparky!uunet!ukma!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!agate!stanford.edu!lucid.com!lnz
From: [e-mail] (Leonard N. Zubkoff)
Subject: Re: Diamond Speedstar 24X: Is it edible or poison?
In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of Thu, 28 Jan 1993 17:26:31 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: Lucid, Inc.
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 18:08:01 GMT
Lines: 19

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Dave Beeman) writes:

   If you plan to use Linux or 386BSD with Xfree386 (the free X-windows
   package) you will have a hard time getting drivers for any Diamond products,
   as they use proprietary code which isn't available to the developers of
   Xfree386.  You will get better performance at a comparable price from one of
   the cards based on the new S3 86c801 chip, like the Actix GraphicsEngine
   32.  My Actix card is blazingly fast with Windows and DOS and the benchmarks
   I've seen for unix/X are comparable to a SUN Sparc II.

Is this really a problem, if the underlying chip documentation is available?
The new Diamond Viper card is based on the Weitek P9000 chip, and Weitek was
quite happy to send me their documentation.  As far as I know, the drivers for
the Viper Card (or at least the P9000 anyway) are produced by Weitek, and I
don't know if Diamond provides anything special of their own.  Apparently there
are a number of P9000 based cards in the pipeline, so is there any reason to
believe they each require specialized drivers?

        Leonard