XGI, VIA Release Open Source Drivers

An anonymous reader writes "XGI has announced the release of open source drivers for its Volari family of graphics adapters. Efforts at X.Org to merge the new code into the head branch are already underway. Almost simultaneously, VIA has announced the immediate release of open source drivers for S3 Graphics UniChrome, VIA ProSavage and ProSavage DDR. Could these moves signal the beginning of a period of rapid improvement in Free drivers for video cards?"

Comments

XGI is decent for desktops but lacking in gaming

[gmikej]

I bought a XGI card for my HTPC thinking that it would be the ideal card for my analog TV (s-video was supposed to be great). It works alright- but it will not boot to ONLY S-video. That means that every time I need to reboot the HTPC I need to drag in my monitor.

I've heard that newer NVidia cards can boot straight to TV.

Now I just have to decide on whether I wait for someone to work out a Open source driver for the XGI card or just spend the ~$40 on a NVidia card when I have a perfectly decent XGI card already.

heh- who am I kidding. I'm cheap. And patient.

...
Come on guys- let's start reverse engineering these XGI drivers!

XGI drivers are 2D only

[olafura]

When looking through the kernel source code there is only support for 2D. Kernel bugreport X.org bugreport

Not as big a deal as the headlines say

[jensend]

The XGI release is 2d only (the kernel code is for fb support, not DRI), and from what I see on the Unichrome driver effort's mailing list archives the VIA source release is just making available to everyone what has been available through a "developer portal" for some time and does not make any more of the chipsets' features usable.

So the only possible real news here is a shift in the attitudes of these companies. We'll see how that works out in the future (whether enough information is released to allow open-source 3d drivers for XGI and full support for the VIA MPEG enc/dec acceleration).

Re:Hopefully..

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I looked, the Matrox drivers that were open source only supported basic 3D stuff, with everything else being in the mga_hal binary, x86-only, module.

"man mga" reveals it's a bit more confusing:

The second head of dual-head cards is supported for the G450 and G550. Support for the second head on G400 cards requires a binary-only "mga_hal" module that is available from Matrox , and may be on the CD supplied with the card. That module also provides various other enhancements, and may be necessary to use the DVI (digital) output on the G550 (and other cards).

So HAL doesn't affect 3D support. My single-head G400 with no TV-out worked fine in 2D and 3D without mga_hal, which is why I bought it, but the 3D was really slow compared to other cards (not good enough for most recent commercial games, but Quake 1, GLtron, and Tuxracer worked OK).

For cards newer than the G550 (like the triple-head Parhelia), Matrox seems to have stopped supporting open-source entirely, making the Radeon 9250 the best chip with open-source 3D drivers.

ATI still garbage.

[Inoshiro]

Won't compile with 2.6.11? Check.
Compiles with BIG, LARGE warnings about depreciated features being used in 2.6.10? Check.
Won't work under x64_64? Check.
2D part of drivers buggy? Check.
Infrequent releases that don't correct problems? Check.
No support for X RandR? Check.

Sorry, the ATI drivers don't pass muster. Perhaps I should've realized sooner with the constant weird 2D bugs I had with the ATI driver. Or the fact it wouldn't compile on 2.6.11. Or the fact it just plain won't work as advertised on 64-bit Linux.

I took out my Radeon 8500, put in a Geforce 2MX I had, and installed the nVidia driver. It was actually wrapped in an installer, rather than me having to manually untar and run scripts ala ATI. It asked if I wanted 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries. It told me that the 2.6.11 kernel fixed some AGP issues and was reccomended (which was good since I already had it, and only used the 2.6.10 because of ATI). X RandR started to work with the nVidia driver. 64-bit and 32-bit apps work flawlessly with each other.

ATI is shit. Their card hardware may be good, but without a driver, it might as well be an ISA SB16 for all the use I get out of it.

Re:ATI still garbage.

[kangpeh]

ATI does in fact run quite nicely under Linux using the fglrx drivers. With a little bit of effort (i.e., compiling the driver, loading it into the kernel as a module, re-configuring your x-org configuration to use fglrx rather than ati/radeon, and so forth), X-org will run very smoothly and rapidly with an ATI video card.

Try comparing the amount of frames per second you get with glxgears using the Mesa 3D Open Source ATI drivers versus the proprietary fglrx drivers supplied by ATI. I think you will get 100 times more frames in a second with the ATI fglrx drivers.

Using the fglrx drivers, I am able to play all games, including Legends, Cube, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Americas Army, Frozen Bubble, Super Tux, Tux Racer, Counterstrike, and others, just to name a few.

The only setbacks seen with the fglrx drivers would be that of the mentioned lack of XRandR support as well as a lack of XCompMgr support (for drop shadows/transparency). However, such minor setbacks on 'beauty' shouldn't be a big decision when choosing which drivers to use.

ATI does not "fail it." While, they do not support the open source community as much as we would like (as, persay, NVidia Corp), they do in fact give us enough support as of right now to be comfortable. ATI's main clientele, as are most video card manufacturers/distributors, are Microsoft Windows users. You'll need to keep in mind, their programmers/staff should be put forth to work on what is important to the financial situation of the company rather than pleasing us Linux users - for now.

After all, a company does not exist without money.