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XGI, VIA Release Open Source Drivers

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the pretty-pictures dept.

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?"

3 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. C3 systems by renehollan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    You could've hired me.
  2. Re:So what card? by didde · · Score: 5, Interesting


    A couple of weeks ago I managed to fry my highend NVidia GPU (don't ask how). At the local 'puter store they only had a bunch of ATI's available at that moment and since it's not easy to use the machine without a GPU I had to settle for one.

    I have to say, I've heard nothing but bad things about ATI cards under Linux as they're drivers are proprietary and rumored to be quite poor. Let me tell you, my X800 is working like a charm! It took me about 10 minutes to download the RPM from ATI.com, run it through alien and then install. It Just Worked.

    Also the TV-out is awesomely overscanned form the get-go as opposed to the NVidias I have been using.

    Sorry for the offtopic, but I am rather chocked that ATI has such a bad rep among you Slashdotters. Proprietary or not, the drivers works flawlessly for me.

    (No I am not an ATI employee)

  3. XGI's "efforts" by Wienaren · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 Online Photo Editor - http://www.phixr.com