Modern Video Cards with Open Specs?

JessLeah asks: "I've been having trouble finding decent, 3D-accelerated drivers for video cards (of late-90s/early-2000s vintage) under Linux. I'd just get a newer card, but it seems like the situation for newer cards is even worse. The market at present seems to be little more than an nVidia/ATI duopoly, and neither nVidia nor ATI have open specifications available for their chipsets. As a result, both of them presently have binary-only, x86-only, Linux-only XFree86 drivers as their sole alternative to Windows. Are there any modern chipsets (with a reasonable cost) that actually have open specifications available online -- or, at a minimum, open-source drivers that can actually compile on things other than Linux/x86" What was the last video card with open specifications that you can remember?

Comments

nVidia is not exclusively Linux

[cbiffle]

I know it's still not what you're looking for, but nVidia's binary drivers are not exclusive to Linux. I use them with much success on FreeBSD.

They're even in ports.

Really, the problem is that they're IA64/IA32/AMD64 specific (they aren't just x86, they're available for those three archs).

ATI Radeon series

[molo]

There are open drivers in XFree86 for the Radeon series of cards. The newer cards are 2D-only, and some older cards (Radeon 9200, 9000) have 3D support as well.

The 3D accel isn't supposed to be nearly as fast as ATI's closed drivers, but its supposed to be functional.

Details about specific cards and chipsets are on the XFree86 Radeon driver page

Hope this helps.

-molo

Matrox

[BRSloth]

Think about an operation system. Any operating system. Now, the chances that this operating system has drivers for any Matrox cards is about 95%. There are only a few that are not supported.

The big deal with Matrox is that they don't do tricks in their drivers. Everything is hardware accelerated (and that's why Matrox cards are so expensive).

BTW, I still have a Matrox Millenium (about four years) laying in a Pentium II and still kicking ass.

Recommendation

[afay]

First of all, nvidia provides drivers for ia32, ia64, and amd64 on linux as well as ia32 on freebsd. So, they don't limit themselves to one arch/one os. (no ppc, but to be honest, i don't think there are that many linux/freebsd ppc users) ati only provides ia32 on linux.

Now regarding a recommendation, if you only want drivers that have good 3d accel and are open source, your only option is to go with matrox. The only problem is that matrox cards are comparatively more expensive for the speed they provide. Instead, I would recommend getting an nvidia based card. Although nvidia's driver is binary only, it's quite good and simply looking at their readme, you can tell that they put a lot of time into it. I personally have used two different nvidia cards in linux for a number of years and have never run into any trouble.

That said, whatever you do, don't get an ATI card. I stupidly bought a radeon 9700 and i've tried every single linux driver that they've released. I can't run any 3d program for more than about 5 minutes without the whole machine locking up. In windows, the card works perfectly. So, if don't want to deal with the hassle of ATI's half-hearted support for linux, don't get one of their cards.