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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)
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).
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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)
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?
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! ;-)
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Good info :-)
Where I see the problem, and what I was trying to draw attention to with my post, is not in determining which graphics card has the best 3d performance but in determining which cards support what features (on what platforms) and how these features perform. In windows land you can buy a video card to handle 2d, 3d, video IO and dual-heading and know in advance what sort of performance you should achieve. If I want to know the same for linux I can't (at least not before I buy the card and stick it in my machine)! I can find out if a card has dri support (or some other form of hardware accelerated 3d) and I can figure out what sort of 2d modes it can support, but discovering what features have hardware acceleration and which don't is a non-trivial task (I haven't spent long looking at dri opensource site but it seems to only have mailing lists). Discovering if a cards video facilities are accessable is again much more difficult, for example you may know that a card will capture video in full-screen PAL, but will the linux drivers do it and if so in what formats and at what performance loads.
In summary, 2d graphics card performance has reached a very mature level where nearly any supported card will provide reasonable performance for all but the most demanding of applications (full-screen mpeg playback may push some cards beyond their abilities and not through the MPEG decoding which could be host processor based but through drawing the volume of final data). 3d performance is starting to become formalised and as such we need information on which cards support what features and how well they perform. Video4Linux should be providing us with some control over capture and output devices, but which consumer devices are supported and what will they do. We need a linuxhardware site which says that A is supported by B and will do C with D overheads, then we can all start to make some reasonably informed decisions about what video card to buy, and stop basing our decisions on the lowest common denominator of 2d and 3d support (and perhaps some of Tom's nice Quake III stats). Bemchmarking is the second stage, figuring out what a card will do is the first.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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...
Look again..
.tgz file with the source code.
I posted the link and the there is a
Hetz (Heunique)
Hopefully they will allow their source to be publicly modified, as video drivers can make or break a graphics card.
One of the major problems with OS/2 was the video drivers. With good drivers it was rock-solid, but with the matrox drivers I had to use it crashed regularly - I eventually found this was the driver and not OS/2. But because Matrox regarded OS/2 as unimportant they never updated them - this was the main reason I abandoned it. If a Windows user tries Linux and discovers it crashes all the time because of an old driver - they're unlikely to come back.
If Matrox want the unix world to use their cards they'll have to release the sources.
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Ignore reality - there's nothing you can do about it.
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
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
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?
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)
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!
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.
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
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)
Please look at the CVS tree of the DRI project, Matrox had worked together with Precision Insight to develop this drivers and the source is there. This particular release seems to be mising one bit (the HAL), but it looks like that will be released, too. Look at the DRI mailing list archives if you want more info about the current status of the DRI.
Half a meg of binary goop!
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When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.