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

C3 systems

[renehollan]

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.

Re:What do they have to lose?

[91degrees]

True, but a lot of hardware companies hoard their IP as though it has intrinsic value. They seem to assume that since it cost something to produce, it must be worth something.

Hopefully this will result in an improvement in the drivers and a detectable increase in sales for this hardware.

XGI drivers are 2D only

[olafura]

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

Re:So what card?

[didde]

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)

Re:What do they have to lose?

[harrkev]

Yup. This is a win-win proposition for them. They just scored major brownie points with major geeks (myself included). I can tell you that if I was looking for a new vid card right now, I would seriously look into their stuff. A week ago, I would have looked ONLY at nVidia.

The impact is that they will likely see a noticable improvement in sales because of this. And as far as their IP, nobody can even come close to nVidia and ATI. You only have to worry about your IP if you are concerned about the people behind you catching up. If you ARE in last place, you have nothing to loose ;)

XGI's "efforts"

[Wienaren]

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.