LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Ati Drivers: Cards
built 613 days ago
The open source drivers ATI drivers are merged into the Mesa source tree (http://www.mesa3d.org) and work on FreeBSD and Linux (maybe NetBSD?). r200 and below hardware is much better supported than r300 and newer cards, but their are r300+ drivers. The r200 drivers were written with specifications (for much of the cards features) from ATI. The r300+ drivers have been reverse engineered.
Source:
In the extensions folder there are .kext files which names suggest that they are drivers for a wide range of NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards. However they have been found non-working. The most common theory is that there are some required files missing and that the drivers are therefore incomplete. There has already been a lot of effort to get the NVIDIA drivers working with moderate success. See the wiki page below which is dedicated to the NVIDIA driver project:
Source:
Actual draw time is .34ms per frame, the remaining time is wasted by the ATI driver. Compressed SGIS_generate_mipmap failure describes how the very-common mip-map generation extension, "GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap", is completely broken when using texture compression. Most modern applications generate mipmaps using SGIS_generate_mipmap to improve texture anti-aliasing in 3D scenes. Texture compression is ... commonly used to reduce the memory consumption of textures in the scene in order that more or more detailed textures can be resident in the display card, improving scene detail and performance. It is very common to use both of these techniques together in professional visual simulation applications to extract the maximum visual quality and framerate from a given graphics subsystem. The failure of this combination of features on ATI cards means that texture compression is unusable, severely impairing scene performance.
Source:
ATI was founded under the name Array Technologies Incorporated in 1985 by four immigrants: China-born Kwok Yuen Ho[1] and Pak Hun Lau and Hong Kong-born Benny Lau and Lee Ka Lau. [2] ATI primarily worked in the OEM field, producing integrated graphics cards for large PC manufacturers like IBM. By 1987, it grew into an independent graphics card retailer, marketing the graphics cards EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder under its own name. ATI went public in 1993 with stock listed at NASDAQ and Toronto Stock Exchange.
Source:
This file contains Quake-specific drivers for ATI's line of 3D graphics cards. These special drivers are designed to improve graphics performance on Rage-based 3D cards. These drivers only work with Quake and do not affect the performance of the card in other situations.
Source:
ATI released v6.8 of their drivers over the weekend, which apparently boasts major OpenGL performance increases. Improvements to ATI's graphics memory manager improves the memory handing of games that need more than 256MB of memory, with ATI citing a 22% incerase in 3DMark06 scores on cards with 256MB of graphics memory at 1280x1024 and higher, with AA.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Cards