Greetings, I have been doing graphics programming in Windows for a few years, and am interested in broadening my horizons. I'm interested in attempting to get FreeBSD to switch video modes and gain access to video memory, perhaps to attempt a simple OpenGL-like implementation or the like, entirely foregoing xfree86 and mesa.
Which card would I be best off using? I currently have an nvidia geforce256, but understand nvidia is fairly hush-hush about how their hardware works. I know nvidia is about to release an xfree86 module, but I'm not too interested in using xf86. I hear ATI is somewhat more open about the technical details of their cards. For this card, where should I look to get details of the interface? I really know nothing about talking directly to hardware, but am eager to learn. I am assuming all cards have a standard set of commands to do things like set video modes and possibly even things like hardware accelerated lines and such, but I imagine things like matrix multiplications and transformations, blitting, etc, are all proprietary. I know DOS uses a set of interrupts to change video modes, and a static address for the framebuffer, but I'm assuming this isn't the case with FreeBSD. If it *is* a static address, would I then have to be running in kernel mode to access such an address? Is this the inappropriate list for questions like this? freebsd-multimedia looks more like userland type stuff... thanks, sh To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
