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ATI Announces Open 2D/3D Linux Support 133

Posted by Hemos from the onward-linux-soliders dept.
RareEYE was the first to point out the press release from ATI announcing their official support for Linux and endorsement of Open Source. As part of their support, they will be "...releasing 2D, 3D and multimedia programming specifications for its industry-leading RAGE graphics technology." ATI also mentions their current/past work with the XFree86 group, which they will be ramping up to an even higher level now.
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ATI Announces Open 2D/3D Linux Support More

ATI Announces Open 2D/3D Linux Support

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  • While I have had support for the Mach64 video chipset for a while, it has only been in the last few months that my ATI TV card had any Linux support. This was due to ATI's refusal to provide any driver info whatsoever. What a fine turnaround this new attitude seems to be, wonder what changed their mind, and how long it will last?

  • Not true (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ATI has supported XFree dating back to 1992 and nearly every ATI adapter is suppored by open source XFree drivers. ATI has been helping developers develop TV Tuner support since early this year. The only new stuff ATI released about 2 months ago was 3D specs for Rage Pro and Rage 128.
  • Well, with a great deal of OEM business, you won't really have to worry about them losing market share..

    BTW: a friend of mine may have "prior work" to disput the RMS trademark of "good thing"

  • This is nice to hear, but in the press release, they only mention "Rage" chips(ets?) more recent than mine (a Rage + or something). Surely they'll publish the specs for the old stuff, too? I hope so.

    Soon as I can, I'm gonna dash out and download all of that stuff that has "...and OpenGL." at the end of its requirements list.

  • Now this is the sort of support that I was talking about in response to the processor announcement from AMD. [slashdot.org]

    Hardware developers and software developers working together for the greater good. It is exactly what Microsoft and Intel have been doing for ages (although not for the greater good)! Is this going to result in Penguins over hardware boxes quoting "Designed for Kernel 2.2.13" or "Yes! It runs with Slackware". I do hope not. I just like to see this sort of cooperation within the industry - it's refreshing.

  • The story so far... (Score:3)

    by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Wednesday October 20, 1999 @03:57AM (#1599689)
    Let me see, I'm not the best person to write this, but I'll try to write a summary of the situation so far:

    3DFX: not open, suffering because of it

    Matrox: partly open, enjoyed a big boost in popularity

    S3: completely open, enjoying a resurgence in spite of underperformance on early chip sets

    RIVA: mostly open, sitting pretty

    Rendition: completely closed, no longer in existence (although their design lives on)

    ATI: opening up today, seeing the light

    Anyone have corrections/more to add for this list? It sure does seem at this point that there's a connection between openness and success for hardware makers.

  • > Oooh, about as long as it takes them to
    > release a full OpenGL driver...

    Hehe. Seems to me like these two things could be related: as a wild guess, the time between releasing hardware specs and someone writing a full OpenGL driver is probably significantly less than the time taken for the original manufacturer to write that same driver :-)

    Personally I have to go with NVidia as far as graphics hardware is concerned, on grounds of general helpfulness and quality of drivers. Matrox are equally helpful to Linux people, but their Windows OpenGL implementation is way behind the NVidia one, which is an issue for people like me who have to work on both platforms...
  • I too, have never had any problems with ATI cards. I recently purchased the Rage Fury 128 (with 32 Mb ram). XFree did not support it at that time, so I ended up trying Accelerated X. Worked great, and screamed in X :)

    Still, I am glad to see ATI doing this. Makes a good company even better.
  • I've never really had any probelms with ATI, even there built in cards on the MB seem to work pretty well. A few years ago i used to sell ATI as the leading video board when i worked at computer city, and even today i would recommend ATI for your video board since they seem to have kept the same quality and support

    now that they have official linux supports, thats even better!

    congrats!

  • I like to support vendors that have supprted Open Source with drivers and information. So how supportive has ATI been as compared to other vendors in this area?

    Does anyone have a good resource for not just hardware compatibility but how 'community' friendly a vendor has been?

    bit

  • Yee! (Score:1)

    by ajlitt ( 19055 )
    Good for them. They finally came to their senses. My work computer has an ATI Rage Mumble Mumble (ever notice that there are a MILLION fscking varieties of that chip!) soldered onto the mobo. No AGP slot either. This is a good thing.
  • Great news! ATI were top on my list of "uncool people who hide their specs", so it is great to see that they might finally be seeing how stupid that is.

    So now we have open source drivers for Matrox and NVidia cards, and ATI starting to look more promising. This leaves 3Dfx as the only major 3d accelerator manufacturer who insists on hiding all their hardware details, which is kind of paradoxical since they actually have the best current support under Linux! How long do you reckon it will take them to realise the advantages of being free as in speech as well as just beer?

  • Releasing specs? (Score:3)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Wednesday October 20, 1999 @02:49AM (#1599701) Homepage Journal
    I suppose this is a good thing, but I have to compare to people like S3. When I couldn't get my S3 Virge GX2-based card to work, I went to S3's site, filled out a form and 2 days later got a 3-inch-thick specification book in the mail. They didn't even ask if I was working on an Open Source project.

    Good to see another company smartening up, though. Eventually I look forward to the day they all write their own XFree86-4 module....
  • On the one hand, the announcement might cause one to expect that ATI would start affixing Penguin logos on boxes to indicate "Linux Compatibility."

    On the other hand, based on the schedules quoted, it is still reasonably likely that with the rapid deployment of video cards these days, cards can go from "initial release" to "retirement" before XFree86 supports the card.

    On the gripping hand, at least the graphics cards should eventually be supported, which is the important thing...

  • I'm having a hard enough time deciding whether to get a Millennium G400 or a Riva TNT2 for when I upgrade my system!

    Now we're going to make ATI an option too?

    I may NEVER get this old PPro with a Voodoo 1 and a Virge/DX (biggest mistake ever, NO improvement over the straight Virge) upgraded.
  • When I registered my Xpert 128 a couple of weeks ago I added a comment requesting greater support for Xfree. That must be the reason. grin.

    Seriously, we should all be doing this sort of thing to make hardware manufacturers aware of how many people are using linux.
  • This is slightly unrelated to the original story, but I noticed the link at the bottom of the press release was for www.ati.com

    Wasn't it just a while ago that ATI's homepage was at www.atitech.ca or something?

    Does anyone have any information on how they acquired this page from its previous owner?
  • I thought they still kept the specs to themselves and business partners that signed one of their silly NDAs... When did that change and where can I snag the specs docs?

  • A friend of mine has a Dell laptop (Inspiron 7500) with the ATI chipset with a 400MHz processor (Celeron, I think). The 3D acceleration is actually slightly slower than the software renderer ! Things like Half-Life demonstrate this. You do get certain texturing benefits when using hardware acceleration, but I prefer the framerate. I don't see any reason why any X server which supports this chipset would be any different. Geometry setup has to be done by the CPU anyhow.

    Unfortunately, you won't see much in the way of overkill until you can get a laptop with that new NVidia chipset ! :-)

    -- Steve

  • It's pretty easy to come down on them. So maybe you are right. But, they're sitting pretty in the XFree 4.0 port. They're the first tier development of the DRI. Which I think is unfair, because they are so paranoid about their 3D specs.

    Personally, I am switching my development on XFree86 from the VooDoo to ATI. (nVidia doesn't work on alpha, and Matrox is too $$)

    Pan
  • That they don't mention the GATOS project, a group that was implementing video capture drivers for Linux for the ATI All-In-Wonder, AIW Pro, and ATI-TV. We pushed for close to a year to get any sort of specs for the video capture chipset and the I2S interface. But we wern't a corporation and they wouldn't release the specs because it was protected under the terms of their contract, or so they said. Funny, where did that contract go?
  • Now that soon I will have 3d games under linux with acceleration that will only leave my scanner to get suport under linux so I could erase windows forever.

    Any one here know where the rage pro opengl will be developed? I want to follow this closely.

    :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
    --
    "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
  • sawtooth support probably isn't too far off. it should be much easier to support new macs, now that there's a unified mobo design (ie, same chips different form factors). i've never used an ATI card, so i don't know how good the support is on PPC (or on x86, for that matter). i don't think there's 3D support (though i could be completely wrong about that), but regardless, ATI's new commitment to linux can only help.

    as for altivec, since mac os X uses gcc, apple has a motive for adding vector support. the general impression i get (read: rumor) is that apple or moto will release a patch for gcc 2.95 in the not too distant future. i'm not a gcc guy, but i would guess it would be pretty simple to add the asm support for the vector instructions, and not too difficult to add the C extentions (just new data types?).
  • Perhaps, but there is a difference between not wanting people to use a wrapper that would allow them to use a *non-3DFX* card for "3DFX acceleration", and offering a driver that would allow people to use their 3DFX cards on a non-Windows OS.

    Altho the docs could probably be used to augment the glide wrappers.. but 3DFX would go after them anyway, so not much changes.
  • Truth is, folks, they've been doing this for the last few months; they gave the specs out to the GATOS project, GGI and the XFree86 team. This is just their marketing team putting the final spin on things.

    Notice there's no mention of any effort to actually help develop anything more; they're only going to be sending out the specs to more open source groups.

    Still really cool, but I think they're trying to take credit from the other people writing the software.


    James

  • Not very. Granted they have an X server you can download and the glx.so module which lets you play q3test, they havn't released specs for their cards so that stuff like agp support, or even dma texture copies can be done. This means that your framerate in linux is about half of what you get on Windoze (I think, don't have windoze on my machine).

    They have released a kernel mod that is supposed to be an interface (they call it a resource manager) to the function I mentioned above, but a) the important code is preprocessed, b) it's for 2.0.34 not 2.2.x and I can't get it to compile even for 2.0.34, c) this is not the way graphics are handled by any other card. This really should be a library or something like that.

    The other real open graphics card maker is Matrox. They have released an API that is being used in the glx project [openprojects.net]. They are getting much higher framerates on a G200 than I get on my TNT2.

    From all that I can gather this also means no one as started to work on the XFree 4.0 DRI implementation for Riva cards.

    Hopefully this news will get Riva to open up a little more.

    Perhaps the demand for a low-end Unix Graphics Workstation with Linux and a GeForce 256 to replace some SGI's will get them moving.
    --

  • Actually the other day I was looking at a box for a network card - I was very happily surprized to see the words "works in Linux" right on the box. It's good to see companies recognizing the need for Linux support.

    "the voices in my head say crazy things"
  • As much as I hate the RAGE chipset, I have to applaud ATI on this move. Note that ATI is the absolute market leader for OEM based graphics - and they do very well in the retail market as well.

    Some people may say that this is just an ATI ploy to be the market leader for every operating system out there. ATI cards could very well be the Microsoft of video cards - but there isn't too much evidence to support this, yet. They are just releasing their specs at the moment, and supporting the development of drivers.
  • Oh yeah... this can only lead to better Mesa support for the RAGE series of cards.

    I've never really seen a Rage128 in action untill yesterday.. It would be sweet if there was a Rage 128 PCMCIA card for powerbooks...

    quake quake quake quake quake quake quake!
  • This is good news, and i hate to rain on the parade, but "supporting" Linux is not enough. Handing us the specs and telling us we have their *permission* to write drivers is not nearly enough. Do hardware vendors just hand over specs to Microsoft and tell them to go at it if they want? No, they write their own drivers for Windows, and distribute them with the hardware.

    What we really need is for vendors to write their *own* drivers for Linux (hopefully, Open Source), and distribute them with the hardware just like Windows. And i don't mean sticking it in a file cabinet on their web site behind a page that says "Beware of the leopard"... i want to go to Best Buy, pick up the latest greatest video card, see a penguin logo on the box, and find a CD inside with an XFree86 server (with source!), pushbutton installation for all major Linux distributions, and a bunch of throwaway programs, gizmos, and game demos to show off the capabilities of the card. That's what Windows gets (except for the Source, of course), and what Linux deserves.

    Are you listening, ATI? You want bragging rights? They're right there for the taking, if you have the courage to reach for them.

    ---
    Maybe that's just the price you pay for the chains that you refuse.
  • So since ATI claims to have some measure of DVD decoding hardware on most of their chips do you think this could have any impact on Linux getting DVD support via using the ATI chip as assisted hardware decoder?? That would be sweet.

    -=-=-=-=-

  • I've got an ATI Rage 128 chip set, and it works very well for a desktop under the beta XFCom driver by Suse [ncsu.edu]. 1600X1200X16M resolution works fast and well.

    I can't run 3D games on it in Linux yet, but it runs Half Life with noticeably better framerate than my Nvidia TNT in Win'98 used to. I've also upgraded from K6/300 to P3/450, but I don't think that's the whole story.

    I've had trouble with ATI in the distant past, and am not a big supporter of theirs. But it seems like they are improving and maybe I'll give 'em one more chance after this news.
  • Well, I'll bite. Firstly, Nvidea, the Riva ppl, are not open. They've simply released a driver with no specs, making peer improvement difficult at best. Pity =(

    Matrox on the other hand, is one of the companies that has helped get device drivers to a level where they are today, by releasing specs since Way Back When (tm) in the days of the orginal Millenium.

    Now, the GLX group ( Link [openprojects.net]) has had specs for the ATI cards for a lil while now, and even has a preliminary driver in the works with DMA and everything. Anyone with a Matrox G200, G400, Nvidea card or ATI card should stop in here, and lend a hand if they can.

    Anyway, insert a cheer here. For every company releasing specs, it sets a precedent for others to do the same!
  • I hope they release the specs for the TV tuners, maybe someone will be able to write the drivers properly, because from what I've seen, ATI sure can't. I'm still waiting for a fix for this ATI TV WONDER card which a lot of windows users have had difficulty with. They've known about the problem for about two months, am I just impatient or do these things really take this long?
  • NeoMagic, the bane of Linux Laptop users everywhere, has an extremely popular chip (the magicgraph) because it serves as a sound chip, video chip, TV out chip, and also slices and dices.

    However, it also is entirely proprietary. I have contacted the manufacturer of my laptop (gateway, who has disowned me) and neomagic directly, and both have said, in not so many words, "fsck off".
  • The usual reason offered for the secrecy is that there are all sorts of tricks and techniques in the software that improve performance. This generally applies to OpenGL and Direct3D drivers. The best-performing ones are much more than just a thin layer over the hardware. They have a lot of tricky 3D code in them, and may have innovative techniques for using MMX, 3DNow, and the new PIII instruction sets.

    These intial stages of the 3D graphics pipeline may not be closely tied to the hardware, and could be "stolen" by other companies for their drivers. The 3D accelerator market is so competitive that even small performance differences can make a difference in sales.

    All the more reason to applaud and encourage the companies that open their specifications - especially if they open up all the code in their best Windows OpenGL drivers to be ported to Linux!

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • Since the first Nvidia beta driver for Linux, nothing happened, nobody seems to develop anymore to enhance this driver, no word from NVidia...

    It is true that the driver was not picked up yet by the community. nvidia released some specs, but obviously nobody could make use of it.

    End of September, there was a brief discussion on the glx developers list with someone from nvidia about it. Problems were acknoledged and it was promised to try to improve the situation by providing us with their RM.

    Alas nothing happened, at least on the glx project. Maybe they released it to the XFree86 team, I have not checked lately (no time right now).

  • It's all about the name. Windows may be popular, but I am hard pressed to find people who actually like it. Windows is popular because it's on every box, and I'd be quite happy to have ATI exploit the Penguin.

    Getting that little logo on a few million boxes might just be the chaotic incentive that moves an individual to investigate the world of Linux, and if that little curiosity brings in a million Linux users, or even just one, all the power to ATI. :)

    The day when we can walk into a store full of Penguins is now in our sights. This is a paradigm shift.

    A few years ago, Tux on a mainstream video card box would have been mock humour.

  • No, Gravis just didn't have a clue about marketing. The Ultrasound was way ahead of any other consumer cards at the time it was released. Gravis knew how to market joysticks, but soundcards are a bit of a different beast.

    Also, there was so much DOS soundblaster software out there (that the GUS tried to emulate a SB for, but wasn't terribly successful) that the lack of hardware compatibility was a huge downside.
  • I have this feeling that ATI is incorporating Linux support so they could include display drivers with the soon-to-be-released Corel Linux.

    ATI may not have the fastest board, but once the Rage Fury MAXX with the double Rage Fury graphics chip setup is available, the first one that can write an Linux OpenGL driver to takes advantage of the Serial Line Interleave (SLI) mode of the Rage Fury MAXX is going to be very popular very quickly. ;-)
  • Is "how to write a driver for the Mac" open? If it is, I would expect this information to be useful for writing a good Mac driver, too!

    Even more shocking, some day soon somebody is going to write a better Windoze driver than the one shipped, for one of these cards that released their specs. This I think will be the big clue needed to convince the hardware manufacuters that it just may not kill them to reveal how to talk to their device.

  • Or maybe it was my comment - I emailed them a while back and politely told them that I would absolutely love to buy an all-in-wonder 128 and had money in hand for it, but said I'd pass on it unless it had Linux support.

    Seriously, I think there have been a lot of us writing polite (and some writing not-too-polite) emails to ATI telling them we don't want their cards without Linux support.
  • >NeoMagic: completely closed, installed on all our
    > laptops, a thorn in our side.

    Neomagic are not closed. See this [redhat.com] (It's a press release by Redhat about the opensourcing of an XFree driver for Neomagic chips)


  • Geez, it's about time! It always seemed kind of hokey that ATI was hidden away behind some .ca domain, and it wasn't even ati.ca

    I'd bet they just forked over a bunch of cash for it.
  • How abount some MPEG acceralation. I haven't seen a board with mpeg accel in linux. All we got is mtv for mpegs and your have to pay for it.

    Next note, why are most of you here crying that it 's not enough? It's a step in the right direction. The drivers will be open sourced more than i can say for Nvida. We won a small battle lets cheer the company, before we flame them for not doing enough, now.
  • On their developers pages they have a link to the GATOS project.
  • It's very likely that their contract was negated over time (I believe they may have had exclusive rights to the bt738 ). Since they are the largest Video Card manufacturer now, they might be more heavy handed with negotiations.

    Given sufficient demand, as well, I'm sure that it's come to the attention of the executive and board of directors, that at some point, ATI will lose money, so it's also possible that ATI bought out the contract (hence terminating it).

    But I couldn't say for sure.

  • Don't get the ATI. They may have opened up, but their performance is still one (Well, two with the GeForce out) generation behind everyone. They won't release a new card until they're 3-4 generations behind. Look how long (2-3 YEARS) it took them to release a chipset that could even beat the original Voodoo1. Their latest is slower (not by much, but definately slower) than an original TNT.
  • You are on the right track, but I think you're you've missed the point a bit.

    Just handing out the specs and saying "Write something." isn't good support. You are correct there, but they don't have to do the drivers themselves. They just have to put the money behind the project to get them written well. In this case ATI is paying PI to do open source drivers. By paying us they assure the driver gets attention, quality control, and that bugs are handled. They also get to set certain standards for the product.

    There's nothing wrong with a board company paying someone else to write the driver. You are also right, that having the driver in the box in a big benefit. I don't know if ATI will do that, but if we right a good driver I don't see why they wouldn't!

    Of course, our company is working to write these drivers so we want vendors to out source their development. We have a concentration of expertise that allows us to do the work faster and better. We get to take our open source code base and write new drivers more quickly by reusing what we already have.

    - |Daryll

  • drivers (Score:1)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    so this means, Linux will finally get some decent, optimized, quality drivers, and Macs will still be stuck with the same shit ones ATI ships. Hows that for irony?

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • Just a small nitpick, but the difference between SLI and the Rage Fury MAXX warrants it. SLI (Scan Line Interleave) has each card render everyother line of a single frame. The Rage Fury MAXX has each chip render one frame and the other chip render the next frame at the same time. with Vsync turned off, this could get very messy which will make the card hard to benchmark. However, for game playing goodness it means we should see around 75 fps assuming your Rage 128 pro gets 37 fps. Thank you drive through

  • S3: Can you get 3D/multimedia specs for S3 chips?

    Yes, you can. I know because I have them, and others are sure to confirm this. Riva I didn't try, although I've heard that they're not forthcoming at this time. ATI - well, that's today's story.
  • Does anyone have any information on how they acquired this page from its previous owner?

    I'm not sure how they aquired the domain, but about a year ago www.ati.com was owned by "Acme Turd Inc.", or some such place. I'm not making this up. They had a big steaming pile of fake dog crap on their front page. It wasn't pretty. The first time I loaded the page, I thought "I must have loaded their Windows drivers page by mistake." :-)

    TedC

  • I've "heard" (ahem) that 3dfx is going to open up some more information in a BIG way. They say they are going to be a big contributor, and will release more specs. The big part is getting all the documentation completed and reformatted.
  • >Linux rendered titanic. big deal to render, who do you think made the modeling, and what about ANTZ, BugsLife, The Matrix, StarWars.... you don't realy suggest that linux is a better system for MM then sgi( who wrote openGl ? take a wild guess...) any way with this big celebration, it took ATI more then one year to bring close-to-working drivers for their shitty Rage-Pro cards i just wonder i much time would it take for the poor people from glx to release a working drivers /gaby
  • ...and what will the support be for the Xpert 98 card? Even in Windows the support is pretty dicey. The only OpenGL support is a fairly crap Quake II implementation.
  • Here is another more cynical interpretation.

    3DFX: Good fast glide driver, bad OpenGL driver but no one cares because all games run under glide (except minigl wrapper for quakes). Result Don't open their driver, don't need too.

    Matrox: Bad opengl drivers, so they open their specs up to get the opensource community and fscking Joh Carmarck to write a driver for them. Then when the linux port is finished they can backport it to Windows and finally have a decent opengl driver.

    NVidia: Many bigbrains ex SGI live here, patent sharing agreement with SGI. Best OpenGl driver of any consumer card. Result don't need to open driver.

    S3: Similar to Matrox.

    ATI: Seen the light of getting John Carmarck to write your driver for you. Opening up....

    It seems there's more a correlation of how desperate they are to improve their driver than opensource=success....
  • This means that all the laptops using the ATI Rage Pro LT will get Linux 3D support !

    That's gonna be very cool ! A linux laptop is already a cool thing but a linux laptop with 3D is just overkill !

  • > How long do you reckon it will take them to realise the advantages of being free as in speech as well as just beer?


    Oooh, about as long as it takes them to release a full OpenGL driver...

  • about time. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why on earth would you hold back programming information on a piece of hardware anyway? The only effect (as far as I can see anyway) will be that you limit your market. Software protocols are a bit different, if you allready have marketshare you actually gain something from holding that information back from the competition. But hardware? Are they afraid the competition's gonna start writing drivers for their cards?? welcomme to the real world guys.
  • They didn't always release specs.

    However that seams to be changing so lets embrace and extend in our own way. I.e. Embrace some really cool video cards and extend ATI's bottom line. This is a "good thing" (TM).

    Don't bother to say how ATI is just doing this to keep from loosing market share to some other card maker. They are but it doesn't matter.

    "Good thing" is a trade mark of RMS -: All rights reserved.

  • but don't get your panties in a bunch. A friend of mine had a laptop with a Rag LT Pro, and he had to wait till just a few weeks ago for the 2D Xserver for it, so increased support is definitely a good thing. But the Rage Pro is a very out-of-date chipset -- it was already pretty slow at this time a year ago.

    I have yet to see a laptop with even acceptable, let alone cutting-edge, 3D support.
  • great news. ati cards are very good and i use them since '94 (now a rage fury) and tried out almost all of them. in former times all ati cards were equipped with drivers for multiple systems but unfortunately they are "windoofs only" now...

    and because it is soon possible to play unreal4linux AND there's an ATI card in very very many computers AND the rage128's are fast, i defenitely WANT 3d acceleration for linux with my fury.
  • I see they're planning on releasing specs for the TV-tuners; alongside the DVD news (previous article on /.), MM support on linux is looking good!

    FWIW, we have ATi cards on our machines at work here, and the XFree drivers are pretty solid under Solaris x86; much better than Solaris's drivers! However, 3D support is going to be needed to get the best from the cards.
    --

  • Unless another manufacturer follows suit with this kind of commitment, I guess my next card purchase will an ATI offering. I recently bought the all in wonder 128 32 meg dealie for my home entertainment system and I am very impressed. That kind of quality graphics on linux would make me a happy camper.
    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
  • Not necessarily, they mention multimedia hardware programming info, which I assume to be all bits of ATI cards/chips that are not specifically 2D framebuffer or 3D related. This pretty much leaves the video capture stuff.
  • OK, here's the revised list based on early feedback (sorry for some ommissions and and inaccuracies in the original):

    3DFX: not open, suffering because of it

    Matrox: partly open, coming up fast

    S3: completely open, enjoying a resurgence in spite of underperformance on early chip sets

    RIVA: partly open, shipping a Linux driver, doing better than 3DFX, threatened by Matrox

    Rendition: completely closed, no longer in existence (although their design lives on)

    ATI: opening up today, seeing the light

    NeoMagic: completely closed, installed on all our laptops, a thorn in our side.

  • Even the Savages?

    Or is it just their obsolete Virge chips?
  • I just read in LJ that Houdini (a 3D software that is used to create special effects in many Hollywood movies) is being ported from SGI to Linux. Maybe ATI doesn't want to miss the opportunity to reach the professional graphics market in Linux that will soon explode.
    Just a thought...

  • >SGI 3D innovation is pretty piss poor when you look at the facts
    like it pioneered all the technology that linux copied.
    >RIVA TNT blows any SGI graphics system..
    drivel
    >Linux rendered titanic.
    Lost in space was better.
    >Another battle won...open source rules!
    not with that attitude, you'll get your butt
    throw out the door.
  • The GLX group has had docs in hand since September. It takes a little to get the ball initially rolling and the bulk of the coders are working on G200/G400 stability and speed for a point release before moving onto the DRI version of the same. We're waiting for the initial work on the DMA portion of the engine to be completed before moving on to the pixel bashing work. That phase should be starting shortly.
  • ...not the VGA BIOS...

    Contact DELL for that- of course, they're going to tell you that Linux isn't supported on that notebook. The VGA BIOS is not supposed to be the one saving states of the card- the save-to-disk is doing that one (and since that notebook was designed with Windows98/NT, and not VESA mode framebuffer, the code to preserve all of that may not be there in the notebook's BIOS.).
  • The Nvidia driver is nowhere near the best OpenGL driver for linux. a TNT2 gets massivly slow framerates because of its lack of using Direct Rendering, AGP, or any kind of DMA. This makes it INCREDIBLY slow, and the matrox drivers in comparison 'rock its world'
  • Correction 3dfx is a little bit open. The specs for the 2D part on Banshee and Voodoo3 were released along with an XServer with source.
  • I had the same problem with XFree support for my ATI Rage Pro LT chipset on my laptop, so I know what your friend had to go through.

    But currently ATI is the main chipset on laptop that offers 3D acceleration. The new chipset ATI Rage Mobility is compatible with ATI Rage 128 (it's the same chip, different output hardware though).

    Hopefully if ATI sticks to what it has announced (and they talk about ATI Rage Pro and ATI Rage 128 chipset support), it should also allow the laptops based on the mobility versions of the chips to work.

    I know this is a little bit of hopeful thinking, but I sure hope this does happen.

  • They didn't always release specs.

    True they didn't but they were one of the earliest suppoters correct? Or am I confusing them with another company?
    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece

  • Re:All-In-Wonder (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All-in-Wonder is Rage II/Rage Pro based. The article did say that they will be releasing the multimedia specs for Rage II AND Rage Pro, so the All-in-Wonder will be supported. If you have an old enough All-in-Wonder (I do) that is based on Rage II, you probably won't get OpenGL 3D features. Even under Windoze, ATI doesn't support OpenGL on Rage II. That's why you can't run Q3Test with older All-in-Wonder cards. Memorize your chipsets you monkey!
  • Yeah, I'm glad they turned around, I ended up returning an ATI card a few months ago because I found out that it wasn't supported at all under linux. Of course an X server is out for it now, but I'm still happy with my TNT.
  • Unsupported on Linux by ATI before now, yes. But the All-in-Wonder does work on Linux/X11 pretty
    well. I'm using my All-in-Wonder right now, it works great. Even have the TV tuner working under Gatos [binghamton.edu].
  • onward indeed...I hope other hardware companies join the bandwagon

    all Linux soliders and solderers prepare...
  • I can only imagine this makes things even better over in the Linux PPC world. Speaking of which, how are the new G4s and Linux? Can gcc take advantage of the new processor, and is there currently any support for 3D (although, if not already there I imagine coming shortly)?

    Ryan
  • Let's not be too hard on 3dfx: for quite some time they were the only ones to provide any 3D hardware acceleration _at_all_! Granted, open-sourcing the driver would be nice! (Starting with the obsolete Voodoo I, for example?)
  • This is wonderful news. I have been a big supporter of ATI and reccommend them where I work. Now that ATI is open, I can brag even more!
    ;)

  • I wrote a 2D/3D accelerated Savage4 KGI driver for Creative earlier this year, until the project was canceled due to dismal Savage4 sales. I still maintain it on my own time. It's far from perfect, but 2D accels work well enough to make XGGI quite pleasant to use and I had passable 3D accels support working with Mesa at one point (the driver is all torn apart these days). I could release some VERY useful sources, if only S3 could be persuaded to let me do so (hint hint).

    Jon
  • As one of the probably many people who sent E-mail to ATI requesting specs and telling them about the convenience and benefits of open source, I'm thrilled :)

    - Michael T. Babcock <homepage [linuxsupportline.com]>
  • Anyone else find it ironic that linux, with the "inferior" support has better openGL drivers for linux (thanks Mesa!) than windows (opengl32.dll, blah). Sure you could install mesa for windows, but most people wouldn't.

    Anyways, I have a feeling 3Dfx won't come for a while...they're still after people writing glide wrappers last I heard...
  • My guess is that ATI has been paying attention not only to the news, but to the polite, sensitive and complimentary emails that I and others have been sending them to motion them in this direction.

    We need only make sure that hardware vendors are aware of the demand, in order to have their support. They are more than willing, trade secrets aside, to give in to numbers, and ladies and gentlemen, we have numbers.

  • Wasn't it less than a year ago that ATI was openly hostile to Linux?

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