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S3 Graphics Fails At Delivering Linux Driver

Posted by Soulskill on from the patience-is-not-infinite dept.

Ashmash writes "Phoronix is running a story about S3 Graphics failing to provide Linux support for their Chrome 500 products even though they have announced in press releases going back months that there is Linux support. S3 Graphics has gone as far as advertising OpenGL 3.0 support for Linux and one of their representatives had promised a driver by last December. This situation has been going on for months, but there is no Linux driver at all for the Chrome 500 series."

4 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid" by Alioth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For Linux users, even back to the early 1990s, S3 has been a synonym for "don't buy this graphics card". Even back then, they didn't release specs for their graphics cards, and they didn't even support VESA modes for graphics mode so their cards couldn't be used at all for X.

    At least the other two closed graphics cards makers do supply drivers for Linux.

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  2. Re:S3 is still around? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nobody cares about S3 Savage3D. Even people who worked there didn't care (I used to know some.) S3TC didn't save S3 from becoming an also-ran. Texture compression was inevitable. Again, if you had fast hardware the Virge wouldn't slow you down... that much :) And if you tried to get the same results as the Virge (mostly lighting effects) in a software renderer, you'd see your frame rates drop one hell of a lot more than they did with a Virge. I would argue that the TNT is the first consumer graphics accelerator worth a crap, but the Virge did have its uses.

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  3. Re:Can we not just get fully open specifications? by Haeleth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Intel graphics chips are fine for pretty much any Linux purpose -- Compiz runs fine, KDE4 runs fine.

    They can't compete with NVidia or ATI for playing the latest 3D games, but that's unimportant, because 99.999% of the people who care about the latest 3D games are either playing them on a console or in Windows.

  4. Re:Maybe it's time to help out by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Unichrome Project is completely unrelated to VIA. Just a guy with some Unichrome cards and the community working together to write open source drivers. Don't blame the poor guy, it isn't his fault.

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