Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
My blog
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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". :)
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.