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?"

What do they have to lose?

[LiNKz]

It isn't like they have much to lose. They sell hardware, the drivers simply let that hardware operate. They probably also know this will earn them points with the Open Source Community.. which is always a good thing.

Well . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

You paying attention to this ATI?

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.

Could be

[El Cubano]

Could these moves signal the beginning of a period of rapid improvement in Free drivers for video cards?

Only if nVidia and/or ATI follow suit. (I know that in some cases they can't, but they could take an approach like Netscape and Sun did, release everything you do own and leave out the stuff you don't).

just a nit

[digitalgimpus]

... merge the new code into the head branch...

Does anyone here consider the head to be a branch? IMHO a branch is taken from the head. The head is just a trunk. Not a branch.

moderate root as 'troll'

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-players soon to be players.

But they paid you to post what they did, didn't they?

Huh?

Desparate times...SUE ME!

[Anonymous Coward]

"It was mentioned in a comment on slashdot somewhere that the code in the ATI or nVidia drivers may be propriatary and closed source as liscensed from someone else. They may have bought code from company x but company x may not allow for that code to be open source. So instead of re-writing the drivers entirely so that nVidia/ATI own all of their own code, they may just stick with the binary drivers to protect other companies IP."

And of course we ONLY have their word that that's the real reason.* Sounds like the same reason they used for the nForce ethernet driver...until someone reverse-engineered it. Then they suddenly became all helpful.

*Security (from us) through obscurity.

Re:Hopefully..

[Skjellifetti]

Matrox has had free open source drivers for their cards for quite a while. Hasn't seemed to impact ATI and Nvidia yet. Still, one can hope.

Sorry, but the XGI announcement is a half-truth

[bersl2]

The XGI drivers are 2D-only; you still have to use the binary library provided by XGI for 3D.

This sucks, too, because the performance of the XGI Volari V8 is comparable to a Radeon 9600 or Geforce 5700. And I'm sure that their drivers suck, so there's probably more performance in them. And it's dirt cheap, too. A 256MB card comes in at just under $100, and a 128MB card at $85.

XGI needs to be told that this isn't enough.

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 ;)

lets hope nVidia and ATI follow suit

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

whichever went first would score a real coup against the other.

Re:Hopefully..

[TheRaven64]

Last time I looked, the Matrox drivers that were open source only supported basic 3D stuff, with everything else being in the mga_hal binary, x86-only, module.

Re:C3 systems

[Hoplite3]

As someone who uses a fanless C3 system with the open source unichrome /xxmc drivers, I object to them being called "less than reliable". I've had zero issues with them. In fact, when I was investigaing whether or not to use the VIA solution or the open source one, it came to light that that the via solution didn't work as well:

http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?do ci d=25289&group_id=102048

Moreover, VeXP isn't fully functional. It has issues with full screen play, other video codecs, etc. If you want to do something besides watch mpeg2, you need the open source solution.

However, building mplayer, xorg, and unichrome to all play nice and use hardware took me several hours and a lot of curse words. It isn't exactly straightforward. (But maybe it improved from feb 2005.)

drivers are rarely done 100% in-house

[SethJohnson]

This is not completely fair. Most hardware companies depend on code in their drivers that their staff did not write. As contracts generally go, the outside developer usually imposes limits on use and distribution of their work. It's invariably more expensive to purchase outsourced code without restrictions.