Review of the Matrox G450 For Linux

The Evil Dwarf from Hell writes "Hardware sites for the most part concentrate their reviews of new equipment for the Windoze OS. AnandTech has a head to head review of the Linux drivers for the GeForce2 MX and the Matrox G450. The GeForce2 MX dominates in the test scores, but the G450 is interesting in its ability to use 2 monitors simultaneously. A single desktop that is 3840x1280 is incredible."

Comments

Re:Are the MATROX drivers open source as well?

[SquadBoy]

AFAIK, The matrox drivers have been OSS from almost the start. On the other hand the EULA from Nvidia says this. "No Reverse Engineering. Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, nor attempt in any other manner to obtain the source code. No Separation of Components. The SOFTWARE is licensed as a single product. Its component parts may not be separated for use on more than one computer, nor otherwise used separately from the other parts. No Rental. Customer may not rent or lease the SOFTWARE to someone else." This is sad because I really like their chipsets and would love to use them but on those machines where video is important I don't feel I can because I simply can not think of any reasons for using closed source for mission critical applications. I *really* wish that Nvidia would open their drivers.

Re:Are the MATROX drivers open source as well?

[twilight]

That's not QUITE true.

Actually, the Matrox drivers are open source, but rely on a closed source library (hallib) to achieve dual head or TV/DVI out. This is because
copyrighted code (by Macrovision) in the library.

So, you can get any Matrox card working with OSS drivers, but if you want dual head, you'll have to link with that library (its distributed in the drivers from their site).

NVIDIA's drivers, on the other hand, are closed source. I regret not bringing this point up in the article actually.

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
Anandtech

Re:Bah

[twilight]

Actually, I wrote the article, the GeForce2 MX DOES support Twin View (the Windows drivers didn't implement it until recently), the card I had was a Twin View capable card, but it's not suppored under XFree86 yet.

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
Anandtech

Evas, window managers and OpenGL acceleration

[tjwhaynes]

I first came across a few comments by Rasterman on how he was intending to try and lever OpenGL acceleration to render windows in Enlightenment many months ago. This struck me as being a smart way to get true alpha transparency support for the windows/menus/icons and not completely stuff up the CPU with processing by offloading the processing to the GPU. It also opens the doorway to a whole host of fancy, over the top special effects such as spinning, shrinking windows when you iconify them and the fancy transient effects seen in the Mac OS X window manager. This is the first tests I've seen of the actual code, but does anyone know how close the development code is to being an effective OpenGL accelerated window manager?

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:Evas, window managers and OpenGL acceleration

[twilight]

It's a LONG way off. Evas is 90% done by the looks of it, and Raster even has the first app using it, Etcher. Check out screenshots on http://www.rasterman.com/

As for EFM and Enlightenment, they're BOTH going to be rewritten and combined. Hopefully enough code will carry over that it won't be THAT major of an effort, but I wouldn't expect to see anything for a while.

The alpha blended, transparent window thing wont work even with Evas due to X limitations. Check out the Render extension though, http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/ -- it'll do it and they almost have it working with normal X servers judging from teh mailing list.

Evas is good for things like actually drawing out the windows. If you've used EFM, you know that it can start slowing down with a lot of icons -- and it should, that's a lot of alpha blending going on. With Evas, every icon will be drawn with hardware acceleration. (evas_test goes from 10fps in Imlib2 software mode to over 100 using OpenGL typically).

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
AnandTech

Re:We've been had! Look Harder!

[tjwhaynes]

The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.

Sorry - you are going to have to swallow your pride a little! Scroll down that page to the base where it has a link to XFree86 background and you will find the rest of the review. Just because there are links to two Windows reviews of the two cards doesn't mean that that is all! :-)

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:Typical Slashdot IGNORANCE: THEY ARE *NOT* OSS

[twilight]

Actually, that's not quite correct. The Matrox drivers released on their site are completely OSS and all changes in them will be incorporated into the next release of XFree86. Hallib, the closed-source library that you mention, is necessary ONLY for Dual Head, DVI and TV out. As distributed with XFree86, the driver will work fine, provide 2D AND 3D acceleration.

The library only handles:
1. Setting the card's clock
2. Initializing screens properly for
TV, DVI or Dual Head output.

This comes straight from a Matrox Linux developer too, by the way.

Consider the Matrox "released" drivers to be nothing more than the code in DRI's CVS tree linked with Hallib. That's not quite accurate, but it's close to the case.

Jeff Brubaker
Linux Tech Writer
AnandTech