linuxaudio.org

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 00:15 -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:

quoted text
> > When I start to understand the registers that a piece of hardware

> > makes visible I start to understand the architecture of the product

> > itself. If NVidia believes has an advantage over ATI in some area then

> > possibly ATI would copy that and improve their performance. Neither

> > company probably knows the intimate details of the inner workings of

> > the other company's chips and hence thinks they have the advantage.

>

>    is it really that hard to reverse engineer the binary only driver?

> Does it make any real world difference for competitors? (my guess it

> that it makes no difference and that companies are either fooling

> themselves or just don't want to bother with legalities of releasing

> info parts of which might be owned by other companies etc.)

For a sound card, it's easy.  James Courtier-Dutton reverse engineered

the Audigy LS in a few days.  But a 3D driver is literally like rocket

science.  It's _hard_.  This was discussed on the "open source graphics"

thread on LKML.  The consensus was that it's essentially impossible.
Lee