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3DLabs Releases Linux Drivers
wilfie writes "3DLabs have released linux drivers for their for Wildcat III and Wildcat 4 Graphics accelerators. Being closed source they'll taint your kernel, but what the heck. Press release with penguin-friendly quotes available too." DataSquid has a note about ATI's Linux support: "While on the job hunt, I came across this posting at ATI seeking a project team lead. Last on the list of key responsibilities is "Act as a leader to improve the overall quality of Linux support at ATI." Good news? Certainly better news than what was suggested before."
This is the kind of statement that taints the integrity of the ope source community, and is a prime example of why few commercial companies support Linux.
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
Someone took a rocket launcher to a nerf gun shootout
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Looking at the plethora of video cards with differing amounts of VRAM, performance specs, drivers for Linux, stability problems with Windows (especially newer OS versions and Service Packs which often make video drivers unstable), I've got a suggestion.
Why not make a commodity video card with about 8MB video RAM (a Mattrox 8MB card out-performed a 32MB S3 hands down), and a stable open-source Linux driver? Will this lead to commoditisation of the video card and drive all other mfrs to imitate?
Just wondering...
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Are the card companies afraid more of revealing technology to their competitors, or of revealing their benchmarking cheats...er optimizations?
I has to be closed source, so application specific cheats^H^H^H^H^H features wouldn't be so blatant. I wouldn't expect any graphics card driver from a manufactorer to be Open Source.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
Exactly...and just as you have the freedom *not* to use a closed-source driver, you also have the freedom to take advantage of it.
Too often, I see people confusing freedom with politics. Though they sometimes collide, they are *not* the same thing.
Personally, I don't give a crap whether or not the drivers are closed-source. If I ever put the cash down on a 3DLabs card, i'd be a lot more interested in being able to use it on my OS of choice. The freedom to do high-end 3D or video work on Linux as opposed to Windows is a lot more interesting to me than the ability to modify the source code of the drivers.
In 2 words: I agree.
It may not be acceptable for gfx card manufacturer to release full specs for their hardware immediately after hardware.
But there is no reason to hide specs for hardware older than 6mo or a year.
(Currently running radeon 9000, because of it's open source dri drivers. I'm buying r9500 or higher as soon as there are open drivers for it).
I've nvidia too, but if they don't start releasing some of their hardware specs, I'm not buying their stuff again. I won't even mention the closed drivers for their motherboard here.
The only problem is that 3DLabs isn't supporting Linux... They are supporting "linux-somespecificprocessor-somespecificversion"
Might be better than nothing, but not much...
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
3DLabs have released linux drivers for their for Wildcat III and Wildcat 4 Graphics accelerators. Being closed source they'll taint your kernel, but what the heck.
The heck is that we can't port them to other systems and platforms
I am just taken aback that these drivers are not Open Source. The Open Source developer community would have a lot to contribute to these drivers; they could enhance the performance, add new functionality, and make them more robust.
One word: Bullshit. All R100 and R200 Radeon cards have open source drivers. There are, at most, about a dozen people who work on those drivers and the majority of them are paid to do so. Being open source isn't going to make a flock of people go running to improve the drivers.
Dinivin
These are not Linux drivers. These are Red Hat 7.3 drivers. I'll stick with NVidia for now, thankyouverymuch.
Yeah, but the drivers they release suck. I bought a Radeon 9000 from them, after the website said supported in Linux. The driver has the option for dual screen, however, there is no way in hell I can get it to work. I have found hundreds of Usenet posts where other people can't get it to work. I haven't found a single post of it working. I emailed ATI on two seperate occasions. The first time I received no response. The second time I asked for a known working XF86Config, and I got a canned response saying they would get back to me. They never did. Right know, I have a $130 piece of silicon that doesn't work. The drivers they do provide only work under XFree86 4.1.0 and 4.2.0. To me, ATI has no Linux support.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
is will their best card with their driver burn
smoking rings around my nvidia card with nvidia's
drivers the way that nvidia cards with nvidia
drivers burn smoking rings around ATI cards with
ati drivers under linux? I tell you this... If
ID does a 180 and doesn't release a Linux version
of Doom3 at the same time, or a reasonably short
time after the windows version, I'm getting
whatever card is fastest under XP and giving up
on Linux gaming altogether. It's really nice
having a quake3 link in my blackbox menu, but
I'm already sick of having to reboot to play
counterstrike, NOLF2, and other games.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Workstation cards are optimized for SPEC Viewperf, 'consumer' cards are optimized for Quake3. Case and point.
In particular compare the Radeon 8500 (a reasonable but not really spectactular 'consumer' card) to the Wildcat3:
e.g.
R8500 is ~ 17% faster in q3 but the WCIII is ~39% faster for ProCDRS
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
Well, since they've only released rpms for specific kernels that are shipped with redhat 7.3, I don't know that you can say they're supporting linux, so much as supporting a very small subset of linux.
Too bad if you need to step outside the box, but then, if you're using high-end workstation graphics software, that's probably something you don't want to do, since the software's probably targeted at the same place. You tend to lose support from vendors quickly, even tho 99% of the time, the differences mean jack, unless the vendor's got crappy software to begin with. (you hearing me oracle?! your installer is a PITA)
Still, redhat 7.3 is miles out of date, and that you're SOL if you need to say... use your own kernel for some reason, or hell, NOT use redhat at all.
I really hate companies that do that. Redhat's always been far more annoying to configure and use than I'm even remotely interested in dealing with, and they keep making it more useless every time they make a release. Hell. I'd happily tell people to use windows than deal with the annoyances that come with trying to use redhat to get stuff done.
[end generic rant]
If course, since I just ragged on the HOLY REDHAT, I'm probably going to be on the receiving end of a massive moderation smackdown. oh well.
ashridah
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unleash the power of your wallet then, by NOT buying their product. They'll either clue in and open their source and start selling product, or they won't and nobody will buy it and their company may suffer.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
This is a sad offering. They only support specific, official RedHat 7.3 kernel patchlevels -- i.e., there's no compilable kernel module like NVIDIA uses. This somewhat limits the audience for these drivers -- certainly makes them useless for me. I'll stick with my Quadro.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
Taint may well be a technical term but the common usage of the word evokes very negative images, and its usage here is clumsy at best.
Tell someone who doesn't know this technical term that their system is tainted and they'll probably panic, imagining that their PC has been hit by a virus, trojan horse or other undesirable event, where the reality couldn't be further from the truth. (We'll leave the debate about the pros and cons of closed source drivers to another discussion.)
There's got to be a better way of describing a kernel that contains closed source software that isn't so dramatic or apocalyptic. How about "ajar"? At least "ajar" is a better, less ambiguous, description - to me it says "not 100 percent open, and not 100 pecent closed", which is what we're talking about.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
They suck at Quake 3, but are great for 3D professional work.
Sorry but if I am working with live 3d rendering the damn card had better give me fast-ass quake speeds.
We switched to Geforce 4 ti's here from the crap-quality $2000.00 3d labs cards because the customers when previewing the 3d renderings thought it looked BETTER on the low end geforce card under openGL.
final rendering has NOTHING to do with the video card anyways, and it's only good for preview.
if you are lucky to have apps that will use OpenGL for preview rendering... toss the "workstation" crap out. get a el-cheapo gamers card and make your clients thing you upgraded the hardware.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's the point.
By using closed code in your kernel you are putting an unknown in it.
This is bad, the kernel developers can't help you, you can't fix it yourself, you're just stuck with broken software.
I think removing the ability to fix a problem is a dramatic change, particularly when that is a major benefit of free software.
Thanks for the (OT) correction. it is late here. There are some companies out there that do in fact do this. Sigma Designs drivers for the EM84xx chips have a GPL'd kernel driver and a closed source shared library.
The only issue with this is that even though the kernel driver is open source, it exists purely as a "RING 0 gateway" for the shared library. So if bugs exist, they cannot be fixed by the open source community.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
They fixed their Windows drivers, so let's hope they can do the same for their Linux drivers. ATi's cards are fairly nice; certainly a little better than the dim-looking GeForce FX line, and I say that as someone who is completely neutral when it comes to corporations. (No reason to make generalizations about anything except their products. Unless they're Rambus, in which case they're evil.)
Amusingly enough, the only nVidia card I'd recommend buying right now is their Titanium 4200, the very card that taught them a valuable lesson about market segmentation. In case you missed the whole thing, the Ti4200, Ti4400, and Ti4600 were spaced about $50 apart, except they had a performance difference of maybe 2-4% between each of them. The Ti4400 cannabalized the Ti4600's sales, then the Ti4200 cannabalized the Ti4400's sales. (ATi learned this too with their Radeon 9500 Pro, a fast card selling for less than the Radeon 9700 despite the small speed difference. They were quicker to react than nVidia, though, and stopped the 9500 Pro's production run short. Now they make the Radeon 9600 Pro, which is considerably slower than the old 9500 Pro.)
In the USA, corporations and organizations are treated as singular.
In Britain and many other parts of the world, they are treated
as plural.
For examples of this, try looking at BBC news items.
*sigh* back to work...
In a related note, S3 graphics has released open source drivers for the S3 Savage graphics family. See eg. here.
I have been observing that most of the notebooks dont use Nvidia graphic cards. Instead they prefer using mobility Radeon or some cheaper on-board cards. This is problem for me, because I am looking to buy a notebook on which I will install linux. Nvidia has fantastic linux drivers, so I wont have to worry about hardware 3D acceleration, if I buy a notebook with Nvidia graphic card. But I just dont see any notebooks in the market with Nvidia graphic cards.
How does Radeon behave under linux in notebooks? . How is the 3D acceleration in mobile Radeon 8500+ ? Are the opensource drivers good for full screen DVD playbacks? (I usually test hardware acceleration by playing TuxRacer)
My impression on at least one of the reasons why they do this, is that there is certain proprietary code licensed from other companies in these drivers, which they simply do not have permission to release with an open license. I suppose the primary manufacturer (ie, nvidia, ati, or 3d labs) could work to get the people who do own the proprietary licenses on that code to open it. However, this seems like a lot of work from a video card chip manufacturer's perspective, for (debateably) little gain. I've also heard grumblings (maybe just rumors though) that companies are afraid to release their drivers open source, because then competitors can see how their architecture is set up.
"How about "ajar"? At least "ajar" is a better, less ambiguous, description - to me it says "not 100 percent open, and not 100 pecent closed", which is what we're talking about."
Or better yet, how about "ajar-jar"? That way we can hook the Joe Sixpack crowd with the sheer cuteness of the term, along with the 3-6 year old user group.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?