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S3 Tries to Get Back Into PC Graphics
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of S3's attempt to get some traction in the lower-end graphics card market, the Chrome S27. Though its specs look great--256MB memory, 700MHz core clock rate, 1.4GHz memory clock, and 22.4 GB/sec memory throughput, it still manages to underperform similarly priced video cards from the red and green graphics companies."
Only, if they start to provide drivers for the Open source community.
My Averatec has a unichrome and am having difficulty getting it to
work *well* with anything other than the X vesa driver. No DRI, etc.
Help out S3!
Another company to ignore.
Supply full GPL/BSD licensed source code to the X.org and kernel.org for inclusion in mainline. That will trigger a lot of positive support.
Besides, I don't really see a downside, because who, besides free software lovers, would be motivated to buy something non-nvidia and non-ati at this point?
Cheers
Simon
I remember the day when my PC was finally faster than the processor on the Virge, but boy, Descent looked kickass in special 'S3' mode. Of course that was also 1996.
Go S3!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With the advent of xgl, compiz etc. we really NEED a decent 3D card with open drivers on Linux. I couldn't care less about gaming but xgl sure as hell looks awesome! I don't need a full-blown NVIDIA or ATI card for that. Open your drivers S3 and I promise you I'll be buying at least 6 of these cards as they become available.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
> Besides, I don't really see a downside, because who, besides free software lovers, would be motivated to buy something non-nvidia and non-ati at this point?
People who do not play high-performance games might not want to pay $100-$600 for a graphics card. Joe User is far more interested in multimedia playback than 3D graphics. Intel's sells their embedded graphics cards for $7, and they are the biggest seller of graphics cards. Plus, they have open source drivers. There is plenty of room in the low-end for S3, although they have a lot of work ahead of them if they want to compete with Nvidia and ATI.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
This is what, the third or fourth time S3 has tried to 'make a comeback' in the graphics market? It always seems to happen the same way. Big price features in a small price card! While the hardware might be ok, and compete on the low end.. The drivers never seem to catch up. This is what the big players have. An established codebase for drivers that gets tweaked each time a new chip comes out.
Predictions for new S3-super-thinamagig:
1. Early previews from hardware review sites- "Shows promise!" "Should compete at entry level" "Good for casual gamers." Drivers will be buggy.
2. Card released many months after initial previews. What was mid grade is now low end, and card doesn't look so hot against current competitors. Drivers still buggy. S3 promises bug fixes and performance improvements.
3. Several off brand Taiwanese manufactures will make cards featureing new S3 chip. Cards will quickly be relegated to bargain basement prices in retail and online shops. Mobile versions of chips will be found in cheap low-end laptops and versions of the core will be seen integrated in to via chipsets for cheap onboard video. Drivers still buggy.
4. S3 continues product line and no longer updates drivers. (Drivers still buggy.)
With any luck S3 will do better than their previous attempts, but they've got a lot to prove. In all likelihood, this will go the way of the S3 savage, S3 chrome, trident cyberblade, XGI volari, powervr2, and powervr KYRO.
First they compare a $115 card to cards costing $125 and $129. Then the price drops to $99 and they 'stand by their review' against those more capable boards because they didn't pan it for performance, but for basic flaws? Uh huh. That would be because SLI mode doesn't work? What sort of idiot would buy a $99 card for SLI work? Ok, AA doesn't appear to work for GL, that is bad but will almost certainly get fixed in the drivers pretty soon.
It looks like S3 is trying something interesting, throw high speed but dumb hardware at the problem of 3D instead of trying to put more compute power than a P4 on a board. But they are going to discover that the drivers are a big part of the equation, it was clear that their drivers probably what was holding their scores down on several of the tests. Since they obviously don't have a lot invested in them yet perhaps they are the ones we should be pushing to support open source. Despite what that PR moron at Nvidia said I suspect the Open Source crowd could whip those drivers into shape in short order, Use the right license (MPL or BSD) and they could roll those improvements back to Windows and carry the fight to ATI and Nvidia.
I know I'd certainly switch from ATI Radeon 9250 (most current 3D with Open drivers) to this new S3 tech if it had an open driver.
Democrat delenda est
i've been trying to keep track of video card comparisons, and rank the cards since the 5200. since neither i nor my friends can buy $300 cards, i kept the list to the lower end of the spectrum. what is interesting is where the current generation of integrated graphics on the motherboard compare to which cards.
**best price/performance**
nVid 7600 GT ($210)
ATI X1600 XT ($170)
nVid 6600 GT ($140)
**best price/performance**
the faster at top:
ATI X800 Pro ~$250 ($150 refurb)
ATI 9950 ultra (N/A)
nVid 6800 LE/XT (LE=slower)($150,$300)
ATI 9800 XT(~$185)
ATI X700 PRO($125,135)
nVid 5900U/5950 Ultra($250)
ATI 9800 PRO(~$130)
=ATI 9700 pro
=ATI 9800 ($90??)
=nVid 5900/5950
ATI 9700 ($110)
nVid 6600 ($100)???
nVid 5800 ultra
(3GHz)
nVid 5700 Ultra (N/A)
ATI X1300 PRO($105)
ATI X700 (not pro)
ATI 9500 Pro ($95 used)
(yes it beats 9600pro!)
=nVid 5600 Ultra
=ATI 9600 pro/XT ($100)
=ATI X600 PRO/XT ($100)
nVid 5800
ATI 9800 SE(128 bit)
nVid 5700/5750
nVid 6200 non-tc (under $100!)
=nVid 5600
=ATI 9500/9550/9600
ATI X300 non-Hypmem???
nVid 5700 LE (MINE)
nVid GF4 Ti 4600
nVid 5200 ULTRA
nVid 5600 XT (XT=lower)
ATI 9600 SE
this last group of expansion cards is equal to the current generation of integrated onboard graphics
***very slow***
nVid 5200/5500
nVid PCX 5300
nVid 6200 Turbocache
ATI 9200 SE
ATI X300 SE Hypermemory
current generation of integrated graphics chipsets:
-- Intel GMA950
-- nVidia 6100/6150
-- ATI xpress 200
i disable sigs
3dfx is coming out with Voodoo6!
However, I do sympathize with linux users who want quality drivers for all types of graphics hardware. I doubt, though, that NVIDIA or ATI will ever release open-source drivers for linux. I think they can and should take the desktop linux market seriously and release high-quality, closed drivers, even if it affects the OSS purity of the linux operating system.
For decent article reviewing some of these issues, see this.
This is exactly why NVIDIA and ATI keep their drivers closed-source.
If you look at S3's product, you see a device that has great hardware specs (looks great on paper) but fails to deliver because of buggy/incomplete drivers. S3 isn't alone in this - XGI faces similar problems.
The truth is that a lot of the performance of modern GPUs comes not from the hardware but from the drivers which supply it with data. NVIDIA and ATI keep their drivers closed-source because they don't want a company like S3 to benefit from their software - NV and ATI love the fact that everyone else has buggy, slow, incomplete 3D drivers, and that's the way they want to keep it.
Is a stable interface in Linux so that the graphics card companies can write closed source drivers that don't need to be updated with every minor kernel revision. The problem is that graphics drivers contain proprietayr, licensed code. There's no real way around it if they want to support all the features. Even OpenGL itself must be licensed. Well, they can't just go and relicense the code and open it up, even if they want to.
So this is a situation where Linux needs to make a concession, if they want better support. This attitude of "open source always!" needs to give way to an attitude of choice. One where you provide all the tools necessary to do open distribution, and open distribution of your own tools, but the option to use closed source for those that want to.
If you don't want that, fair enough, but then you can't be too angry when the graphics companies won't accomadate you and your rather small marketshare. If you won't be accomadating to them, don't look at them to be accomidating to you.
http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open- Graphics
IIRC they are shipping FPGA PCI cards and you can download the chipset image. The plan of course is to sell PCI ASIC's for $150 or so. They have a pledge page where you can give them an idea of how many cards they can sell for a first run.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
Mod flamebait, it's obviously designed to provoke controversy. As others have stated, you've gotta start somewhere. With a company that has so little marketshare to begin with, they go with the largest share of the pie first, and that is the Windows market. Course a little nudge nudge wink wink could do wonders with getting them to write Linnox drivers.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I'm no longer entirely convinced that open source has a huge benefit for video card drivers.
Okay, yes, it's probably not a bad idea, but I read an article from some guy at Precision Insight about this.
The argument was that video card drivers are among the most complex of drivers. It's kind of like Mozilla -- there is a significant barrier to just dropping in and hacking away -- so you don't accrue programmers left and right.
Granted, I'd still buy any card that has good open-source driver support and is more modern than my Radeon 9250, but I'm part of a limited set of people.
Open source works very well for a number of things, but there are definitely systems that it's less effective at:
* Systems that require a significant understanding of a large deal of code before commits can be made. People get scared away from Open Office and Mozilla. Emacs has done very well, but even though it's a sizeable codebase, it's also extremely modular on a by-feature basis. You don't need to learn much to be able to write a new useful feature or understand how a particular feature works.
Anything that requires non-general knowledge has a significant cost in an open-source package. Custom code that replaces standard code (string classes, replacement data structure code), knowledge of the software package's threading model, strange conventions, you name it. Having a codebase that is easy to drop into and start working is always nice, but it is especially important for open source projects.
* Systems that cannot be used by the developer. Okay, this probably isn't an issue for graphics card drivers. Really, really esoteric stuff or things that few programmers have interest in (like simplified interfaces for existing software) don't tend to attract many volunteer developers.
Games with limited replay value are another example. Successful open-source games, almost without exception, have very high replayability and make relatively little use of elements like plot twists, eye candy, or anything else where the enjoyment only comes through once or a few times. Such games tend to either be multiplayer or involve a significant random element. If games can't be played over and over by the developers, the developer doesn't get much enjoyment out of playing them and drifts away.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.