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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?"
So based on this news what is the best card to buy?
I wish all other hardware companies did this.
This is good news for fanless C3-based systems using CLE266 MPEG acceleration hardware: Via had released closed-source drivers (and, indeed, forked Xine to use them in a product called VeXP). These drivers were reverse-engineered to support an open source equivalent, which was less than completely reliable.
You could've hired me.
These companies have absolutely nothing to lose by releasing their driver "secrets" into the open. They are both non-players in the graphics card market.
I doubt this move will have any influence on ATI or Nvidia to open things up but we can always hope...
The quality of these drivers becomes extremely good in the X tree such that both ATI & Nvidia lose sales because of it.
The only way those two will release their own drivers as open-source is when they feel a pinch in the pocketbook.
...to the question about free drivers: yes, maybe, I certainly hope, all of the above.
We already get our drivers for $free on most platforms. Free as in open and easy, I certainly hope so. While we've made great strides in compatibility over the years, getting the hardware people on board and co-operating is still lagging.
When 95% of each sector of the hardware market is co-operating, then we'll just have to hope coders are doing something useful with the platforms now that they're working.
I'll put this in my personal "Good News" category for future reference.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
And guess what? I think this will ultimately increase their sales. As more drivers are available, choosing hardware to run Linux or some obscure OS won't be so difficult, so people will be more likely to buy a piece of hardware.
I think this will also improve the quality of their products. Often, drivers, like any other software, contain bugs, which can cause it to appear as if the hardware isn't working as well as it should. Or perhaps the driver isn't quite as efficient as it could be with system resources, so it seems as if the hardware isn't quite as fast as it should be. When these things are released under open source, it is more likely that things like this will get fixed and improved, and that will ultimately improve the vendor's hardware product without requiring any significant effort on the part of the vendor.
XGI and VIA are doing a smart thing. I'm heading over to write them an email about them and thank them. I suggest that others do the same. This is great news, and I hope other vendors will follow.
Are we getting a fully open source GLX driver as well? Does that GLX driver exploit all the features of the chip? If there is hardware shaders can the GLX driver use those? Or are we getting something like the open source "nv" drive that only does 2D?
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I'm glad to see this positive development from XGI. Releasing open source Linux drivers can't help but give them positive publicity. Back in November of 2003 I said we had "an opportunity to persuade [XGI] that supporting Linux by releasing drivers would gain them positive reviews and have an impact on sales." XGI has released the drivers, now it remains to be seen whether this drives sales.
I don't know who persuaded XGI to make this commitment to open source but I fully intend to consider XGI for my next video card. I'm using an nVidia card today on the basis of their closed-source driver support for Linux, but I'd rather support a company that embraces open source.
Read up on video cards and Macrovision ... if companies making popular cards like ATI and NVidia start open sourcing drivers, it'll allow end users to trivially circumvent DRM plans (also read up on the whole 'trusted path' idea ... encrypted straight from CPU to monitor).
It's time to shift your support to companies that support open source (and by consequence, oppose DRM).
...or you could look at it as giving people only what they are paying for.
Is it really a racket, then or is it actually more of a manufacturing strategy? On the surface, we all want to think that price should be based on what it costs to make it. But there's more to it and, really, the only time material, labor and overhead costs come in to play when pricing an item is finding out where your break-even point is. After that, it's essentially demand setting the price. The fact is, that there are several markets... the home user market, the professional user market and on and on.
And forget that you're a technical type and think like a business man who doesn't know tech. When you are told you have these three graphics cards to choose from, each with comparable capabilities, one of them has this ridiculously low price for its class. Are you inclined to buy that one? Most business people don't because it causes them to doubt the lower-cost device. "Why is it cheaper? Must not be as good."
But back to manufacturing, it's important to lower manufacturing costs where ever possible... if it were your job to do it, you'd probably be no different. It's cheaper to make a bunch of the same product and then disable features and sell them as lower-end rather than to manage that many more product manufacturing lines.
Is it frustrating to the technical consumer to know this? Hell yeah. I've got a Dell Inspiron advanced port replicator and a Dell Latitude advanced port replicator that are freaking identical hardware and they work interchangeably except that some ports don't function properly. I haven't decided to crack these two things open to find out what's different, but there is a fairly significant cost difference between the two devices.
Is it a racket? No... I think that goes a little too far.
who here has actually used an xgi card, and what was your experience?
I am extremely curious--they are cheap, but I want to know about performance.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I ask because outside nVidia, Windows drivers are usually lacking one way or another, specially when it comes to stuff like OpenGL. It could be interesting if someone worked independently on Win drivers for mainstream videocards.
PS: It's great to see some companies realizing they are on the hardware buissnes, not software. Thank you. I had interest in the S3 Deltachrome/Unichrome series, and now i'll most certainly try one out.
Cool. XGI took a very old version of the SiS driver, stripped out many useful features, uglyfied the code beyond belief and calls this *their* effort of open source development.
And the worst part is that my name is all across "their" source.
Finally, probably needless to say, the 3D part is not included.
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The current FOSS ATI X drivers are based on information (and, OTTOMH, code) released by ATI and good for cards up to the 9200 series. Higher-powered cards will run also, but the more advanced hardware features aren't used.
NVidia didn't even release the source to a commodity item like their nForce LAN chipset, so we had to clean-room our own for that one.
The Volari cards look good. I'm pleased that the hard-working lab-rats there have finally managed to convince management to Open their 3D drivers too (they Opened their 2D stuff more than a year ago). Now all I need to do is fine someone in Western Australia who sells the XGI cards other than as a novelty item.
The VIA S3 cards suck. S3 cards have always sucked, from their horrid little every-one-different pre-Virge series on down. The CyberBlades sucked less, but were still not in the same league as their competitors, not even on par with Intel's basic integrated chipset. At least now we might be better equipped to work around some of the suckiness.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing