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I'm wondering if it's a nod to a guy who used to make lots of custom drivers for graphics cards. It was the only way to upgrade my old Mobility card at the time, so I used them quite often. He still has a site up here:

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

Even without the source code, hardcore hardware/driver enthusiasts can dissasemble the binary blob and create their own binary patches for it. They've been doing it on Windows for years to produce driver packs like the Omega Radeon Drivers and it doesn't seem to hinder them that they don't have the source code. When NVIDIA bought 3dfx and killed off development of all their XP drivers there were like 5 different third party driver packs available within a week or two.

Of course having the source code would make it 100x easier, but you don't have to give up just because you don't have it available.

That's a grand ramble you went on there.

Check out Omega Drivers

The biggest problem I have with laptops it the lack of driver updates.
My laptop has a nVidia graphics card, but is unsupported by nVidia.
The drivers need to be updated by the manufacturer and I cannot use the universal
driver. My old laptop with Geforce 2, hasnt had a driver update since 2002.

Omega drivers work for me if I use Windows. But usually I use a variation of Linux that has the latest drivers in the recent six months the distro was released.

Don't the ATI/nVidia Omega drivers work in Vista? Assuming they do, it seems most of the crashes were due to people being ill informed or giving up rather than the fault of either manufacturer. Personally, I would place blame on Microsoft before any manufacturer as I am sure they have *something* to do with the driver design process and making sure nVidia and ATI are properly informed. The ultimate blame, of course, rests on the users for daring to install a Microsoft product before SP2... http://www.omegadrivers.net/

I've never had any problem installing ATI or NVIDIA drivers in fedora. In XP I like to stick to Omega drivers. But for the record the ATI card was an x800xl and the NVIDIA a geforce 7900gtoc, soon to be an 8800gts, today.

I use the latest version of the Catalyst drivers. Day Of Defeat and all other HL1 mods were unplayable in OpenGL, and barely tolerable in Direct3D. I proceeded to switch to the Omega alternative, and all is well now.

The Omega Drivers have always been a good substitute, for both ATI and nVidia. ATI's drivers aren't all that bad, I haven't personally had any issues, but their software is a mess. I have an All In Wonder X800 XT, and I tried their PVR software and it was buggy and unresponsive, as well as poorly laid out. I decided to use a third party PVR and it worked perfectly.

I don't disagree with you that their render engine could be more efficient, but if you are only getting 6 fps, something is wrong. I run SL on my old 2Ghz laptop with a Radeon 9700 Mobility. Granted a little better than yours, but I regularly get 20-30 fps with most graphics settings medium to high. Check in the about panel to make sure your drivers are _at least_ OpenGL 2.0. I would also highly recommend using the ATI Omega drivers http://www.omegadrivers.net/.

I had an ecs laptop with the same issue about lacking ATI driver updates. I was able to install the unofficial Omega drivers, which imporoved performance and worked flawlessly. Until I cracked the display of course. :)

Rubbish.

I'd say 50% of the drivers I install under XP warn me that they're unsigned. The ones from larger companies like nVidia are usually later updated to include said signing, but the others remain unsigned indefinitely - especially for older or more obscure hardware.

You can probably say goodbye to projects like the Omega Drivers unless they can summon up the requisite fee every year to get their modified drivers signed.

I hate to reply to myself, but this is worth noting:

The ATI/OEM drivers for the X1400 are crap for gaming. They are choppy in-game, among other problems - like once you exit a graphics-intensive app, it chews 100% of one core of the cpu until you reboot.

Once you ditch those drivers and install the Omega Drivers ( http://www.omegadrivers.net/ ) it works like a dream. It's probably a good idea to do that for just about any Radeon card.

ATI do not support the mobile chipsets at all and even say this on their website. This isn't a problem through, since the drivers from the Omega Drivers project are at least as good, if not better.

I've found that the Omega Drivers will install fine on such systems. I've had to reinstall XP on several laptops with weirdo custom ATI chipsets before. I'm somewhat bothered by using a non-official driver, but enough gamers use Omega drivers that I'm sure there would be an uproar if they were seriously flawed somehow.

The bigger issue with Vista is that the beta versions I've tried (my Vista Beta 2 file transfer manager has been stuck at 0% for two days now) is that it doesn't allow the installation of unsigned drivers. I haven't found a signed driver for any sound device I have on any PC I own. Of the laptops I've tried Vista on, 802.11 was only supported on two out of four, and only one modem was supported. I'm not sure how "custom" wireless NICs or modems are; there aren't many vendors for those chips. Regardless, Vista doesn't wanna work with them.

Try omega drivers:
http://omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php

Workd great with my x220m.

But I agree with you that the drivers for laptop gpu's are horribly managed. Unless I misunderstand you, nv isn't any better, their unified drivers are only for desktop and a few highend laptop gpus, most laptop chipsets are stuck with manufacturer provided drivers, as is my HP laptop with ATI x200m so I think Acer is not the only one...

Have you tried the omegadrivers?

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

It's probably your drivers. Go here and get the latest: http://www.omegadrivers.net/

It's not their fault, drivers on laptops are typically crap, and adapted drivers like omega obviously can't be officially supported.

I haven't seen a video driver update in months (even though ATI is releasing a new Catalyst every month). Lucky for me there's Omega drivers (now I can use OpenGL 2.0--thanks for nothing Alienware!).

And who makes a "gaming" laptop with a widescreen display that can't scale resolution to fit the display while maintaining aspect ratio? Any game that requires 4:3 ratio on my 16:10 display gets stretched or uses a tiny portion of the screen.

Their windows drivers have never been very good either. If you are using windows, I suggest you use the omegadrivers http://www.omegadrivers.net/. But even then, you still have to update bi-monthly, which is crazy. And all of your old setting are reset after every update.

I've been playing with the TV software and it has barely changed since about 5 years ago. (And it worked better then...) Anybody out there know of an open source TV tuner software package that works with ATI cards (and Windows)?

ATI's hardware is wonderful, it a shame you can't use it!

http://www.omegadrivers.net