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Matrox Releases XFree86 4.0.1 Driver
As the title says - Matrox has released a beta driver for their G200/G400/G450 which includes support for DualHead and QuadHead (up to 4 monitors), Flat Panel and TV out. This driver is a beta. You can get it here and I mirrored it here. You'll need XFree 4.0.1 in order to use this driver. Please follow the readme file carefully! (the readme file from Matrox's FTP needs to be converted dos2unix). Note: you cannot use the 3D hardware acceleration on the 2nd monitor (yet).Matrox & Precision insight - Keep up the good work!
Look at the DRI project's developer mailing list archives. There's a message from Jeff Hartmann hinting that the source for the HAL will be relesed eventually, too. (Wait for the archive to be updated, the message is fairly recent, that's the reason I can't provide a direct link to it)
As long as 4.0.1 compiles properly.
Rename your old X dirs ! before install.
- --[... The secret of the hanged man, the smile on his lips... ]-- -
On the down side, I sent them an E-Mail asking how the Rainbow Runner works in Linux and I never heard back from them. Pity. I was all set to drop some cash for a TV capture card (I since got diverted and haven't investigated that scene for a while.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm not sure if its posible... But why not integrate dual monitor support into linux. I have a mac and it was obsencenly easy to add a second card (Just plug and go...)
It works great, except the menu bar doesn't float with applications but you get used to that. I love dual monitor set ups.
I don't know enough about X to know if its posible
The G400 works just fine under FreeBSD with XFree86 4.0.1, including DRI-based 3D support. We also support voodoo3. Other drivers will probably follow when I work out a way to share more of the driver source code betweem the two operating systems.
...is that the new driver model for XFree86 v4 is something that works. Hardware manufacturers can now ship one driver, and not worry about which distributions to target (or even Linux vs. BSD issues, because they all use the same driver model). See that? When third parties have a single target, they ship stuff. When faced with fragmentation, they only sometimes ship stuff, and when they do, it's usually only for the most popular marget segment (cf. all the third party software advertised as "For Red Hat Linux"). Way to go, XFree (and Precision Insight, which contributed the module loader).
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
They're not really available yet (just a beta version but you can't upgrade from the old debs, it's seperate), but check www.debian.org/~branden for updates.
My other
I've got a single-head G400, so the dualhead support doesn't appeal to me as much as increased 3d performance and the ability to run in 32bpp mode. Unfortunately, when I downloaded the binary and put it where Matrox said to, everything fell back to software 3d rendering, and the driver continued to complain about 32bpp not being supported. Am I missing something obvious? Has anyone gotten 32bpp and/or 3d out of this driver?
Who uses that?
What's wrong with
perl -pi -e 's/\r//'
?
The G400/450 is a dual-head AGP card, not so? So how do you do Quad-head? Do you need a motherboard with two AGP slots? Do they make such a beast?
This on the same day that my NVidia-based Guillemot 3d prophet DDR-DVI and my IBM T86D arrive. I'm using them at this very moment, and loving it. I'll have to get a Matrox G400 and DVI daughtercard now, just for comparison :)
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
My two cents... Math Faq on Polygons
Well, you could always run opengl apps and see how they handle. Duh!
Maybe it's not the best benchmark, but running simple linux games like quake3, heavy gear 2 and the like are reasonable judges of how well a 3d card will perform under linux.
I have now tried almost every major brand of card on my machine, and without a question, for games and standard opengl, Nvidia's drivers, in the case of the TNT2 and the Geforce2 I've tried, kick butt.
Try running the program "mtri" under your mesa's demo dir. Make sure to link it to the right opengl libs. Like magic, you can see how many triangles your card can push in-window (which is slower than full screen btw).
In window, the Matrox G400 I tried scored about 1m triangles. The Nvidia geforce score more than that, by almost 3.5 times! (taken at 32-bit color 1280x1024 on an athalon t-bird 800 w/ 256 megs pc100 ram, for those who care). The TNT2 scores at just below 2mtri. For reference, the Voodoo3 3000 scored just below the TNT2, at about 1.8 mtri (this test was done in 16-bit color tho, so ymmv).
That's plenty enough benchmarking for me. Code I write runs well with one card, and at 1/4 speed on a Matrox card. Now, don't get me wrong. I love Matrox. I think it's admirable what they are doing, and I plan to buy a g450 w/ dual heading for my workstatin computer because dual monitors make coding easier. But for raw 3d performace, both in games and simulations, nvidia cards give you the best performance you are going to get on an x86 machine, open source or closed.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I like that they are getting their act together with Linux drivers, but talk about one screwed up company who still doesn't have drivers out for W2K after 8 months. Sounds like they need to hire some more people to develop drivers.
If they take as long as they did with the W2K drivers then you won't see their final Linux version anytime soon. The only benifit is that you can get the source and fix it yourself before they will ever be done.
I'm honestly interested, if you've tried this... How well does GLX work over two discrete video cards in a dual headed config? The Xi Graphics people had a demo at LinuxWorld showing a G400 dual head doing 3D accel spanning both screens flawlessly. Loki had Flight Gear running on what the demonstrator called a dual headed G400 as well, though I believe it was just mirroring at the time for the projector. Pretty nifty stuff that didn't look too bad at all...
GPL: Free as in will
Look at the DRI project website (yes, I know, I have said this a gazillion times already). They developed these drivers, and the license is the XFree86 license, i.e., you can't get more free than that.
Download the source from Matrox, download the source from DRI's CVS. Run diff. Modulo the HAL, these are just about the same drivers.
The README file in the linked tgz states that the driver is for the Millenium (I and II) and the Mystique....no mention of the G400 or multihead or tv or ........
That said, I am still dying to get my hands on a good graphics card for Linux (it would be nice if it would do BSD and Be but Linux is _my_ OS of choice) and this is starting to sound closer to the mark. Anyone able to offer any real feedback on what this can do? The one thing we are really missing now in terms of X Video Card support is a "Tom's Hardware" site which reviews the cards and drivers so that we can all find out what features we can expect to get out of modern cards under XFree and what sort of performance they offer (primarly of interest vis-a-vis OpenGL frame rates and dvd playback cpu loads, but scalability (1head - 4 heads + tv) and video capture performance (achievable undropped data rates, resolution and frame rates). Anyone able to write useful benchmarks for any of these areas...if so please do and send them to Tom GPL'd (and/or anyone else you think might take this on).
The debate over Nvidia's open V closed drivers is so virulent because we do not have any good performance comparisons, and also because support for features beyond standard 2d and 3d are essentially undocumented/unsupported and therefore it is difficult to determine what features you would get out of your ATI All in Wonder 128 (to take what I feel is a good example) if you use it under linux without just buying one.
If Linux (and really the free OSs as a whole) wants to be any more mainstream for "home" users and not simply as a second OS on a machine designed for Windows, we need to start gathering up the hardware and driver (the two are inexorably intertwined for Free OSs) information so that people buying a PC can quickly see what there machine will/should do under their OS of choice. The vital areas are video and sound, but other items such as Nics and capture cards would be beneficial.
If such a site already exists please post the url:-)
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Look at the DRI Project website, read the docs. Read them again. Then come back and complain. OpenGL hardware acceleration works. You just have to read the documentation to get it going. Or if you don't want to upgrade to XFree86 4.0 just yet, keep using the Utah drivers, they are just as good.
I tried fiddling with utah-GLX on the pinstripe release with limited success (some apps worked, most didn't). But I see the pinstripe is using 3.3.6 but has most of 4 installed. Anyone go the
rest of the way and try this out?
-Mark
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
My father uses OS/2 as his primary OS (I choose Linux), and he runs a G200 PCI as his graphics card. He's never had the slightest problem with the driver support. At all.
Oh, well. Speaking of OS/2, the interface is very VERY nicely designed. If I could get GTK+ to look and feel like that, I would be very happy indeed.
Suggestion to IBM: Work with the GNOME guys or something and try and get us an OS/2-like interface for Linux!
Yeah, I'm way off topic. So there. :-P
-RickHunter
The links are all good. The troll is our helpful find. I thought I would find his improved links on his post. Maybe he just saw glx in the address and assumed .cx.
I tried to install this for my G400 Dual Head. After upgrading X to 4.0.1, I set up my dual screen's per the instructions, but I just get the following error:
Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11. Server aborting
The logs seem to show everything working perfectly fine.
Anyone get this to work in Dual Head?
Ummm, I have what you listed here (ok I have the video card that is the step up from your's with Composite Video out and 32 meg ram) and have ZERO problems. in fact it works great! as for the PP zip drive, it works as fast as the Win-crap drivers (although I dont use it anymore... i got a SCSI internal Zip now... 70000% faster) Parallel scanner works ok, printer- well I bought a real printer and not some win-crap, but then I'm an educated consumer. Oh and my IDE cdrw works great :-) Yes it's IDE. AS for the Rewritable function.. only a moron would want that to work - I buy CD blanks for 39 cents each so using a RW is just stupid.
Sounds like someone dont want to take the time to make his wacked hardware work.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
all used 2 matrox cards of various memsizes and speeds.
as I understand it, even the 400 series is junk for dual head accel. use. so for me, its still "chew up an agp AND a pci slot for 2 video outs". oh well.
I do remember when matrox was on the shit-list for linux and xfree86 (oh, back in 95 or so). now, as far as I'm concerned, they're the card-of-choice for anything linux (or freebsd, etc).
ati varies too much. S3 used to be cool but that was many yrs ago. and all the other players are 3d based (and when moving xterms around, who cares?)
btw, the last xfree that correctly implemented dualhead with a pair of matrox cards was 3.9.16. nothing newer works for me and I'm still using that quite old beta. in a production environment, no less! ;-)
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It was stated a *LONG* time ago that the production drivers will be open source. It was also stated that the alpha/beta releases would be closed.
HAND
No, AGP is limited to two slots. However, (under Win98 at least) you should be able to just get a PCI (there is no Gxxx in PCI though) card and run dual monitors that way.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Isn't that ironic, that the DRI driver only does 16bpp when a major attraction of the Gxxx series is the great 32bit color quality?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
This just fucking about time ROCKS.... I'm going out right now and buying a 17" monitor that can do 1280X1024 at a nice refresh. I do both. sysadmin and dev. I have a bunch of apps running displaying system usage. and then there's XFMAIL, gaim, Xchat, and other misc things that keep loaded all the time... This way I can monitor thoese things with out cluttering up the desktop Currently I'm running with a 19" monitor with 1600X1200. things get messy. real messy. this will just make things more simple and productive. What would be really cool is if I nca drag things from display :0.1 to :0.0 and vice-versa... is that possible?
Yet another cool thing would be to get several G200's. and USB keyboards's and mice to match the amount of G200's/monitors.... and have a nice full color. ful mouse terminal system. :).. once 3D stuff is set... you hook all this up to a quad XEON machine and you can have one machien with 6 ppl doing graphic design or something :).
-- Jason...
Our hero clicks on the DRI Project page and breaks into a sweat.
Just what I've been looking for! Oh, yeah! Thanks for posting!
Good-bye free time, hello carpal tunnel.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I hope this driver proves stable, as I would hate to give up the speed it allows. For 2D, the G200 is a cheap and capable card, but the driver with XF4.0 was so slooow. Waiting 15 seconds for the stipling to fill in when exiting from Sawfish @1600x1200 was getting on my nerves. Now it takes less than 1/2 sec.
Way to go Matrox!
Don't know about your dvd-drive, but mine reads cdr's just fine. It's a Pioneer drive.
Slagborr
Score:-1, Funny
Look again..
.tgz file with the source code.
I posted the link and the there is a
Hetz (Heunique)
Good
Things like this are great this allows linux users to worry less about being able to use video cards.
Bad
No source hardware drivers cause the biggest problem in system stablity if thier is a problem it can take long to fix.
I've been running dual-head off my G400 Max for a few hours now, and it appears to work fine so far. One snag: The driver will gladly attempt higher resolutions, but I've noticed problems with anything greater than 1024x768x16 on both monitors. It feel SO GOOD to have that second monitor back up...
Perhaps they could open source part of it somehow, so that any bits with their sensitive secrets in were kept under wraps, but everyone could benefit from open source developement of the rest of the drivers.
I've got a Matrox G400 DualHead (running under 2k admittedly), but the reason there is no acceleration for the second monitor is becuase the second monitor isn't actually accelerated on the card.
Yes this sucks, even the mouse pointer on the second monitor isn't accelerated, its done entirely in software. You can look forward to lots of pointer flicker on rapidly refreshing windows (like video) with this card.
QuadHead, kinda makes you think of the matrix doesn't it? Go Matrox, We want IsocaHead cards for that real Matrix feel!
You get support for the second head? And it _is_ a beta release... 3d support should be there in the final release.
All programs that used MesaGL, stopped working after I upgraded to XF4.0. All I got was a core dump.
The new XFree 4.0.1 has now fixed this problem. So I think you should try that one.
I think his point is that this driver just disables the ability to use 3D. I just installed it, an DRI doesn't work anymore. (Oh .. ok it did not before either, but now it doesn't crash, I only get software rendering ;)
Samba Information HQ
I have a Prophet II (gotta love Guillemot and their metallic blue PCB's, right...err...anyways).
.a, that conflicted if you didn't remove X's lib) but that was a 1 second fix.
What nasty things have you heard? I've yet to have a problem with their drivers. Actually, there was 1 problem (X using libglx.so and the nvidia drivers having a
I've been looking for a good dual-monitor card for our FreeBSD dev workstations at work.. anyone try this yet? This *should* work due to the awesowe platform (though architecture) independant modules for XFree86 4.X.
:)
Too bad the Riva TNT drivers don't use the XFree86 4.X drivers. Matrox not only gets kudos for using the XF86 module, but for releasing the source code! This is how it's supposed to be. Take notes NVIDIA.
If this does indeed work in FreeBSD, Matrox is going to get some business! Trying to sell the company into buying a bunch of workstations from hardware.bsdi.com that come w/ the dual-head cards. And if it doesn't work, we've got the source code to make it work
Because Nvidia is much worse about binary drivers. ATI could be another alternative depending on what your are looking for. Matrox has given back to Linux and they are working on doing more but it would really suck if they did something stupid like releasing things they license from other people. Let them work out the legal details so they can do it right. I'd hate to see any company get shutdown because of legal problems just so you can have source. Ok, I might cry less if I didn't see another Trident or Savage chipset but I still would some. Just be patient with these companies. It takes a lot of work to turn one of these big ships and I believe that Matrox is coming on around. Hopefully Nvidia is making the swing too but it will take time to work out the legal issues. Have faith.
xinerama.jpg and
xinerama2.jpg
enjoy!
-- DuckWing
I should take the time to look this up myself, but were can I get .deb files for XFree86 4.0.1?
END
Or maybe someone who is a little more conscious about the tons of waste s/he already produces each year? Or someone who knows those (cyanide-containing) CDR's are not really that harmless when burned or stashed away in some garbage dump? Or someone who wants to use the disks in a DvD-drive (which, as you may know, can not read CDR's but has no problems with CDRW)?
Please think for a minute before calling someone who does not think like you a moron. I do not like being called a moron, and that goes for most people...
--frank[at]unternet.org
Dual and quad head video! I've been waiting for Matrox to have this, it was my last reason for still having that stinking Win machine at home (oh, ok, and to play The Sims, but that's different).
Now I can use all my nice 19 inch monitors and do my web stuff in a realistic environment!
Will in Seattle
Do you have any URLs to back this up? I know it would help me feel a lot better about my G400. Thanks.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
There's a lot of confusion around here...
1. This is not open source; it's an open source wrapper around a proprietary "HAL" library which Matrox distributes in binary-only form. This bad, not only for philosophical reasons, but because it leaves non-x86 users out in the cold.
2. The G400 Dual-Head card does support acceleration on the second head, but the Windows drivers do not, which creates the common misconception that the second head is unaccelerated. Both heads share the same video RAM, and the accelerator can be used to write to either one. I don't know if the Linux drivers support acceleration on the second head.
3. If you're looking for 3D, you can apparently get DRI drivers, or at least information about them, from dri.sourceforge.net. With a stock XF86 4.0.1 (without this driver!), I have DRI working on my G400. It's not terribly fast, but it's cute (accelerated 3D in a window!).
4. These drivers crashed my machine! It seems that no matter what I do, as soon as I launch X with this .o file, my machine locks solid. I have one G400 dualhead and one MII (which I've been using to drive the second head, waiting for dualhead support). Has anyone had the same experience?
I started X with 'startx -- +xinerama' per HOWTO instructuctions with the same result.
I installed using the binary packages from xfree86.org - is an install from source in order?
Look, some of us have real work to do. Yeah, in a perfect world, everything would be Open Source, and Matrox would release a graphic driver that wasn't binary-only.
But it ain't a perfect world, you don't get a choice in the Win world, so deal with it.
I'd much rather get the same level of code and quality code at that, than get no code.
If you really wish there was an Open Source graphics driver for Matrox, start your own project now, instead of complaining. Crank out some code of your own - how do you think we got DVD?
The world is harsh sometimes, but I'd rather have some code as a wrapper than none at all.
Will in Seattle
In addition to the G400 and G450, this driver supports the G200, which is available in quadhead. Indeed, the G200 itself supports up to four quadhead PCI boards in a single system to provide up to 16 displays. (Collect them all! Trade them with your friends!)
I have no idea if XFree86 will happily support all 16 displays. I do know neither my bank account nor my desk will.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
Matrox has released fairly complete documentation for the G400, in fact sufficient documentation to make a very decent GLX driver and an accelerated server. I've downloaded and had a look at the PDF file. They've told their customers how their cards work. Why are they under any further obligation to give out their code?
I prefer open source software, since it generally results in higher quality. I also believe that companies have an obligation to support their customers; for instance, NeoMagic has been very unhelpful with their specifications, and I think that sucks because their customers are the only reason they're in business. But Matrox has been helpful, and open source drivers have been written for most of their hardware. What's the problem, then, if they want to release their own binary-only driver?
Way to go, Matrox. I own a G400 Max, and I'm very happy with it. Keep up the good work.
-John
Goto http://www.matrox.com
... G200MAX - up to 4 monitors in one card!
Look at the
Also, there is a PCI version - so you could put up to 16 monitors on 1 PC! (their X driver supports it)
Hetz (Heunique)
there's no real excuse for not getting a matrox card to work under whatever os you are using(as long as that os tells you how to write drivers).
other than lazyness (my self included here).
matrox release there chip set info and some other tools to go with it.
infact I'm sure i got an email the other day about the g800 chip set info being available soon or maby it was the g450?
anyhow were all to lazy so matrox had to write the driver themselves.
well done matrox, more beer and sleep for me.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Gosh, this looks a lot like source code: HALlib README mga.cpp mga_bios.h mga_dga.c mga_driver.c mga_macros.h mga_shadow.c mga_video.c mga_wrap.h Imakefile client.h mga.h mga_dac3026.c mga_dri.c mga_driver.c~ mga_map.h mga_storm.c mga_warp.c mgareg_flags.h Makefile clientlx.c mga_arc.c mga_dacG.c mga_dri.h mga_hwcurs.c mga_reg.h mga_ucode.h mga_wrap.c
It didn't build for me because I don't have the XFree 4.0.x headers, but....
*** Tough Love pinches himself & still doesn't quite believe he's not dreaming
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
They are certantly both hardware accelerated. The W2k driver just sucks. The dual head support on the max is implimented by have a single large frame buffer (drawn by one accel) and outputting it to two differnt ramdacs (who are windowed to only look at their part).
Keep up the good work Precision Insight! These drivers are developed by Presicion Insight, and other than the HAL, what Matrox released is more or less what's already available at DRI's CVS.
Nevertheless, Matrox is to praise for releasing specifications that allowed people to write drivers for their hardware, including but not limited to the Utah GLX drivers, as well as for releasing source code (not all of it, mind you, but information comming reliable sources suggests it will be there eventually) along with this "beta" driver. So, go, Matrox, go!
There was a press release that Precision Insight will do DRI drivers for G400 (most probably under the GPL), and they promised them for this summer.
Wonder what happened to them.
Real life is overrated.
Wow!
I have gotten dual head once about a year ago and I was great!
But I can imagine if I ever get quad head, no acceleration will be needed...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Can someone point to the original announcement?
Last I knew, the DRI 3D driver for the G400 was rather incomplete. It did only 16bpp, and the basic stuff. The Utah-GLX driver is more complete, in that it does 32bpp as well, but there's a bunch of noise about it's ability to use/accelerate stencils.
Even at that, there's not mention of extensions, like Environmental Bump Mapping, etc. (I know, do it, myself.)
This is a good start. But the key word is, "start".
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Hi Oliver,
unfortunately, Matrox does not released specs
for all parts of their G200/G400/G450 boards.
I had to hack dualhead support for Linux
matroxfb myself without any doc available from
them. Not talking about that they DO NOT release
which memory types they connect to on-shop
devices, how fast are these cores and memories
and so on.
And BTW, I asked for engineering sample of G450
more than 2 months ago, but they even did not
bother with reply that they'll not send it to
me. Just plain silence.
And BTW#2, I do not think that mgaHALlib.a has
something to do with open source. Not even
saying that my PowerPC does not believe that
i386 code is appropriate...
Petr
I wanna try these baby's out, cant wait to get home heheh.
:0
:)
This WILL rock for Blender addicts...
I have this 22"inch tube, It really looks amazing these sample anims of bats nd stuff
Hw accel at 1600 for modeler and desktop on 17"
hell I 'm gonna suxor GIMP...this is gonna roxor
- --[... The secret of the hanged man, the smile on his lips... ]-- -
Code can also be found here.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
And before you say "but the source is available", it isn't. The code in the tarball is just a wrapper around their "HAL" library.
"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS
Abstraction layer sure, but I didn't see anything about the warp in there... $ nm mgaHALlib.a ...
0000086c T MGASetMode
00000984 T MGASetTVMode ...
000008b4 T HSLCVE2EnableEncoder ...
00000f48 T HSLCVE2SetMacroVision
00000418 T HSLCVE2SetMacroVisionRegister
000006d8 T HSLDetectDVD
00000604 T HSLDetectMJPEG
00000b4c T HSLDetectMSP
00000128 T HSLDetectMaven
00000998 T HSLDetectPanelLinkModule
0000053c T HSLDetectRR2
00000fe8 T HSLDetectSIPanelLink
00000e68 T HSLDetectSecondHD15
00000c48 T HSLDetectTVTuner
00000330 T HSLDetectVideoDecoder ...
Maybe you don't know you can download _all_ of the register specs for the entire matrox videocard range from their developer site (free registration required)
Half a meg of binary goop!
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The one bit they haven't released is the documentation for the WARP engine, they have provided microcode that can be uploaded to the card instead. Other than that, the specs are there, and the source is there. Look at the DRI project pages for more info.