S3 Graphics Fails At Delivering Linux Driver 132
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."
S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid" (Score:5, 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.
S3? (Score:1, Insightful)
why are you even bothering buying S3? :P
When you could buy a card that has more support in the community. Thats like buying a winmodem and crying the company hasn't released a driver for it yet even though they said they would.
I learned my lesson about hardware and *nix, either buy what is supported or throw it away
Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid" (Score:2, Insightful)
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:WTF. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:S3 is still around? (Score:4, 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.
Re:Let's raise this barn! (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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.
Why don't hardware manuf. just drop the specs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Deceptive advertising... (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you filed a complaint yet?
Re:Can we not just get fully open specifications? (Score:4, 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.
Re:Maybe it's time to help out (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.
Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid" (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:S3 is still around? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.