S3 Graphics Fails At Delivering Linux Driver

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."

Comments

S3 is still around?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

This is news to me...

Pretty bad form to promise drivers and not come up with them. I wonder though, if their products are any good at all? Last S3 stuff (Virge, I think) that I saw was easily crushed by Nvidia and ATI.

Re:S3 is still around?

[drinkypoo]

I wonder though, if their products are any good at all?

The Original Virge considerably predates the existence of nVidia and when it came out there was nothing even close. It didn't really speed anything up, but it gave a substantial boost to visual effects. It actually tended to come at a frame rate penalty vs. software renderers except on the fastest machines.

Unfortunately S3 never really went anywhere after that, tried valiantly to go out of business several times, and mostly produces shitty integrated graphics. I just did a Windows XP install on a system based around an ASUS motherboard with a VIA chipset and S3 integrated graphics. They seem to work, that's about my only experience with them these days. But certainly S3 has no graphics solutions which will impress anyone. They are solidly at the bottom of the budget bin.

Re:S3 is still around?

[Vectronic]

I don't think they are really trying to participate in the gaming/high end of graphics, I think they largely still focus on onboard/handheld/as little as needed to work graphics.

Which, they are still pretty damn good at (usually), although you may know them better as VIA.

Re:S3 is still around?

[Roman Mamedov]

I'd consider S3 Savage and development of S3TC (licensed by Microsoft and others, renamed DXTC, still lives to this day in both ATI and nVidia cards) to be their moment of fame, and not Virge, which was also known as the first "graphics decelerator". :)

Re:S3 is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, S3's biggest recognition in my life was playing Heavy Gear 2 at a LAN. Some putz was putting mortars on us from way the Hell at the far end of the map with impunity. After allegations of cheating and threats of beating, we all found out his Savage4 didn't support prerry much any way of rendering distance fog. He had an infinite viewline.

After further allegations of cheating and rigging, we found out that not only did he not intentionally arrange a corner case to get this screwup, there were no drivers from S3 that could fix it, and S3 had stopped making drivers for his card.

Re:S3 is still around?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:S3 is still around?

[Daengbo]

The integrated low-end graphics are OK, unless you're using Linux and the driver leaves horizontal lines across your screen, leaving you with no option but the vesa driver (you can guess who's in this situation with a work computer).

TFA's report seems to show a big gap between what marketing wants to happen and what management is really doing. They're at least six months behind on the drivers. That's too bad.

Re:S3 is still around?

[__aamnbm3774]

i think that is the best story i've ever heard on slashdot.

Re:S3 is still around?

[0xygen]

I was cursed with a Savage4 after having a Voodoo 3 for ages... it quickly became known in our household as the Savage Whore, for the sheer number of times it got fucked one way or another.

The drivers were absymal, the hardware regularly locked up and it got replaced real fast.

Re:S3 is still around?

[hairyfeet]

The S3s aren't SUPPOSED to impress anyone...that simply isn't there purpose. I don't know why folks always bring up Nvidia when talking about S3 because they really aren't the same market at all. It is like bring up the Core 2 Quad when talking about a Geode CPU. The S3 is made to be a LOW COST integrated graphics solution. I believe the latest Chrome 5 bumps it up just enough to run Vista with Aero, but gaming isn't something ever meant to do on these chips.

I can say that I have built several office machine running Win2K/XP on S3 and they work quite nicely for that task. They don't generate a lot of heat and thus you can build a nice quiet office machine with it. But it really isn't the same market as ATI/Nvidia. It is the same market as the Intel 945, that is a low cost budget GPU for rendering desktop graphics. Although I believe the last two generations of S3 support offloading some video as well. But for what they do they really aren't bad chips. But I have to say that it is bad form IMHO to promise drivers and not deliver. If I was a Linux user I probably would avoid the company in the future.

Re:S3 is still around?

[argiedot]

A similar, though less interesting, thing involving Counterstrike happened to me. On the old computers I had, it turned out that at the beginning of the round, every player would be displayed (normally, walking, crouching, shooting) but directly above their actual position. Sometimes this would go on throughout the whole game. It was pretty funny, I always knew where they were going.

Re:S3 is still around?

[Kazymyr]

The Original Virge considerably predates the existence of nVidia and when it came out there was nothing even close. It didn't really speed anything up, but it gave a substantial boost to visual effects. It actually tended to come at a frame rate penalty vs. software renderers except on the fastest machines.

Yeah - S3 Virge/DX, the video decelerator. I still have one in a box somewhere. In action games you were better off using software rendering, as you'd get more FPS.

Re:S3 is still around?

[dotancohen]

Some putz was putting mortars on us from way the Hell at the far end of the map with impunity.

Had that happen to me in Lebanon for a few days. Now I know how they did it!

Re:S3 is still around?

[drinkypoo]

I guess it depends on what you define as "worth a crap," but it was the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset and GLQuake that *really* launched the PC as a serious gaming platform

This is a completely fair assessment. It was also something of a nightmare. I was completely blown away with it, but it was a serious annoyance, so serious that I actually bought a PowerVR. I think I still have it, although I don't think I've been static safe since... Once the TNT came out I never looked back. I escaped ATI's 3d stuff entirely (but had had plenty of problems just with Mach32 and Mach64 inconsistencies already) until I got a laptop with Rage Pro, of which it can be said that it is not pure trash. I had a Permedia2 card next which came at a steep price premium and had slightly less performance than a Voodoo 2 card but had about 56% less hassle - and which had real working OpenGL. But that was really a low-end pro card. I had a Riva128 for a moment, subjected it to defenestration when the TNT came out, and have never looked back - nVidia FTW!

nVidia has pulled some serious boners over the years but in general they have delivered the most workable 3d solution, cross-platform and all. I had just discovered what it was like to have money when this stuff was coming out, so I had most of it. I never spent much money on a CPU, so I was pretty familiar with which video cards were more and which were less CPU limited, which was actually a major feature of the 3dfx stuff at the time. But I still curse their name eternally for inventing GLIDE instead of just starting with MiniGL, which would have been a much kinder thing to do to the gaming industry and probably would have resulted in a world without Direct3D.

We can dream, can't we?

Re:S3 is still around?

[shutdown -p now]

The S3s aren't SUPPOSED to impress anyone...that simply isn't there purpose. I don't know why folks always bring up Nvidia when talking about S3 because they really aren't the same market at all. It is like bring up the Core 2 Quad when talking about a Geode CPU. The S3 is made to be a LOW COST integrated graphics solution.

The thing is, both NVIDIA and ATI also have low cost integrated graphics solution offerings, and they are seen much more often than S3. Last time I shopped around for a prebuilt PC (which was like a month ago), I didn't see a single one with S3, cheap or not.

WTF.

[MukiMuki]

If a driver isn't out on day one, there's no way in hell this should be in a press release. I can only hope that it doesn't make it to any of the boxes.

Bullshit like that shouldn't be legal.

Re:WTF.

[drinkypoo]

Bullshit like that shouldn't be legal.

Mistakes are made. On the other hand, you and all the other people who bought one expecting Linux support (you are one of those people, right?) can get together and get a class action suit going against them.

S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid"

[Alioth]

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.

Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid"

[morgan_greywolf]

Yep. Wayyyy back when, when I first tried Slackware and couldn't get X to work with my S3 graphics card, my posts were answered with something along the lines of "Get a Riva TNT or an ATI card."

Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid"

[roystgnr]

For Linux users, even back to the early 1990s, S3 has been a synonym for "don't buy this graphics card".

"For Linux users"? I've never heard of any Windows user intentionally buying one, either... the ones who've heard of S3 know them as the company which once marketed a "3D decelerator", a card so slow that a new computer would be better off with software rendering.

Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid"

[Antique Geekmeister]

Interesting. It sounds like Promise's Linux support: they used to publish customized versions of out-of-date versions of Linux patches that re-arranged your drive numbering without telling anyone and coulldn't be applied against any contemporary kernel source tree.

What NVidia publishes is a fascinating attempt to endrun around the GPL licenses. They publish a binary blob kernel driver, which 'taints' your kernel and legally prevents you from being able to publish it as part of your distribution. And for the features to work, they also replace the OpenGL libraries with closed source versions, which do not integrate well with _anyone's_ package management system, because they refuse to publish any RPM, .dep, or other package managed tool for it, nor does their license allow repackaging it and automating installation. If you want the drivers, you're compelled by their license to _manuall_ have each installer sign the agreement.

This is extremely painful in many environments, and leads to some extremely poorly done repackaging of their drivers and libraries for automated installation, and their exclusion form Linux distributions.

Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid"

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, you fucked that decision up. Next time get the low-profile card, bend the frame straight, and secure it with tape. GF440MX was a peach, sure it was slow, but so solid.

Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid"

[PitaBred]

Actually, NVIDIA specifically allows Linux/BSD repackaging with relative impunity:

2.1.2 Linux/FreeBSD Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux or FreeBSD operating systems, or other operating systems derived from the source code to these operating systems, may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files).

I still don't like the binary blob approach, but they aren't actively blocking any redistribution. They're encouraging it. It's just that distros like Debian don't use it because they have a (valid, IMHO) philosophical argument against binary blobs.

Maybe it's time to help out

[morgan_greywolf]

It may be time to help out The Unichrome Project, which produces a driver that works with the older Unichrome and Chrome9 chipsets.

VIA doesn't have much of a history of helping the open source community with specs or source for its S3 graphics cards.

Re:Maybe it's time to help out

[DJRumpy]

I'm a little confused as to why S3 isn't more open with the Linux community? They are obviously not top of the line and the technology they use isn't going to be snapped up by nVidia or ATI. I doubt that the big two are beating down their doors trying to plant industrial spys. Why won't they release specs? I know nothing about graphics hardware. Would releasing the specs expose them to corporate espionage of some sort?

Re:Maybe it's time to help out

[John Hasler]

> Why won't they release specs? I know nothing about graphics hardware. Would releasing
> the specs expose them to corporate espionage of some sort?

It might expose them to lawsuits and/or cancellation of licenses. Many of these outfits don't own all of the "IP" in their chips and/or drivers. They license it from other companies and in doing so agree to some truly amazing restrictions.

Re:Maybe it's time to help out

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Let's raise this barn!

[malevolentjelly]

I think this simply calls for a really long, over-promising and under-delivering open source driver project in the tradition of Nouveau or anything in DRI produced without commercial support. I look forward to a series of unstable and unusable "releases" which may someday, years from now, result in a shoddy but roughly functional driver.

Maybe some *prominent* linux developers should take some time out of their respective minor IT and sysadmin jobs to create and fully support their very first OpenGL 3.0 driver for this moderately unpopular architecture.

It'll be like a Little Rascals movie, but with more facial hair.

Re:Let's raise this barn!

[thsths]

> I think this simply calls for a really long, over-promising and under-delivering open source driver project in the tradition of Nouveau or anything in DRI produced without commercial support.

As much as I am skeptical of them, Intel seems to be the only company interested in open source drivers. ATI may be making moves in that direction, too, but I am still waiting for results.

As for VIA/S3: at least the specs for some of the chips are out now. Unfortunately, the existing drivers are still some of the worst code I have ever seen - and most things work more by accident than by design, if at all.

Re:Let's raise this barn!

[Kjella]

As much as I am skeptical of them, Intel seems to be the only company interested in open source drivers. ATI may be making moves in that direction, too, but I am still waiting for results.

They've actually made very big progress on the release of specifcations, so it's more on the open source side now. The last release of documentation was the R6xx/7xx 3D documentation that arrvied just a few weeks ago, but there's been some demo code released before that. Previously there's been releases of the ISA and various other bits, so people have been working on the drivers for a while. As far as specs is concerned having power management (basic suspend/resume should already be covered, but not during operation for mobile chips etc.) and UVD (hardware decoding of H.264/VC-1). However, all the specs required to write kick-ass 3D acceleration should now be there.

Unfortunately, one of the things messing things up is that the X graphics driver model is undergoing big changes with GEM (kernel graphics memory manager), KMS (kernel mode setting), DRI2 (new direct rendering interface), Gallium3D (low-level API for shaders) and to support hardware acceleration while using a compositing window manager. It's pretty much all necessary to bring the Linux desktop up to speed but it does throw a lot of balls up in the air at once. GEM was introduced in kernel 2.6.28 and is quite new, Gallium3D was just merged to Mesa master and overall most of this only lives in special compile flags and git branches. There's a lot of promise for 2010 but 2009 will be rough waters.

Download,com

[ciderVisor]

Wow, the comments at the end of that article are priceless. Makes this place look like a debating society.

Re:Can we not just get fully open specifications?

[Xabraxas]

We really need a company to publish all the specifications and produce GPL-compatible GNU/Linux drivers,

We already have that. It's a little company called Intel

Why don't hardware manuf. just drop the specs?

[thesandbender]

I've never understood why video card manufacturers play there cards so close to the vest. The magic sauce is in the hardware... not the API that interfaces with it. Yes... the API gives some insight into what the hardware is doing... but not enough to reverse engineer the product.

Re:Deceptive advertising...

[John Hasler]

Have you filed a complaint yet?

Re:Can we not just get fully open specifications?

[Haeleth]

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.