S3 Graphics Linux Driver Supports OpenGL 3.1

[phoronix]

Phoronix: S3 Graphics Linux Driver Supports OpenGL 3.1

Hitting our inbox just minutes ago was a press release announcing the S3 Graphics 5400E graphics processor. The 5400E is designed to be a power-efficient GPGPU processor with dual-link DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort connection support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzYzMA

[Eragon]

I know these cards are not used by a lot of people, but this is still very good news! :)

[monraaf]

http://drivers.s3graphics.com/en/download/drivers/chrome5x-Linux/Readme.txt


S3 Graphics Chrome4xx_5xx Linux driver package includes a patch to MPlayer to enable
GPU accelerated H.264/VC-1/WMV9/MPEG-2 video decoding through VA-API.



S3G linux driver also implemented a new video API called VDPAU. This API is used by the latest
SVN version MPlayer for video acceleration.


So even S3 has hardware accelerated video decoding for Linux users, that only leaves out AMD...

AMD is making a complete fool out of itself by not letting Linux users make use of the hardware accelerated video decoding features of their GPUs.

[RealNC]

Even S3 supports VDPAU and AMD just stands there and looks stupid.

Great.

[bugmenot]

A closed driver with KMS wow. :)

I'm impressed, such a small company and such a full features driver!

Too bad it's not open. :( But for such a small company it's probably even harder.

Edit:
- H/W accelerated H.264/MPEG2/WMV-9/VC-1 video playback.

- SAMM / Rotation / Xinerama / Compiz

- XRandR support

- VDPAU support

- KMS Support
by http://drivers.s3graphics.com/en/download/drivers/chrome5x-Linux/RN_Chrome5x_Linux_EN_26.htm

Wow!


Now, phoronix, test it and tell us if it really works!

[d2kx]

Even S3 supports VDPAU and AMD just stands there and looks stupid.

Great.

I have a feeling it won't be long until AMD has something similar ;)

[L33F3R]

VIA is hardly a small company. Certainly not intel or amd tho,

few notes:

Long-term supply guarantee
OpenCL 1.0

[cb88]

how exactly is a closed source KMS driver possible anyway?

or do they just mean the kernel module does the mode setting?

[myxal]

Whoa, that's quite a feature-list they got there.
A VDPAU implementation on hardware not dogged by Bumpgate would be awesome. Any info if this actually works or is just PR? (Michael, do I smell a review coming?)

[Zhick]

That actually sounds like a decent, though closed source, driver.
But I'm willing to bet that it's broken and most features wont work. I mean it's via were talking about. They've always been promising great thing yet there linux drivers always sucked badly.
how exactly is a closed source KMS driver possible anyway?
AFAIK their kernel module is open-sourced, though not yet included in the mainline linux kernel.
or do they just mean the kernel module does the mode setting?
Uhm yeah that's what kms means after all.

[7oby]

Michael, test it!

I would like to know about performance, maturity of driver, power saving and whether the annouced features indeed work.

[Michael]

There might be tests, I don't know... S3 Graphics hasn't offered anything for free though and their "GStore" which seems to be the only place to buy S3 Graphics hardware these days doesn't even have any Chrome 500 hardware in stock.

[Ant P.]

I wonder what S3 thinks they have to gain by keeping their driver locked up in a blob.

Knowing how bad their windows drivers are, I'd say they're too embarrassed to release it in public :D

[[Knuckles]]

There might be tests, I don't know... S3 Graphics hasn't offered anything for free though and their "GStore" which seems to be the only place to buy S3 Graphics hardware these days doesn't even have any Chrome 500 hardware in stock.

If their drivers are as great as they announce them to be, doing a feature on S3 on phoronix might put them on the map for linux graphics cards. (Free publicity in exchange for a graphics card -- seems like a great deal to me.)

Hell, xrandr + kms + vdpau + ... sure picked my interest, but obviously I'm not going to take it seriously until I see that it works and that it's not all talk.

[myxal]

Knowing how bad their windows drivers are, I'd say they're too embarrassed to release it in public :D
Reminds of a slashdot comment: 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 pretty 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.:D :D :D

Seriously though, I wonder how are they planning to support a binary blob NOW, when the whole graphics stack is undergoing a major overhaul. A driver that works with X.org in ubuntu 9.04 will be obsolete next week!

[Chad Page]

KMS is part of that overhaul, but yeah it's a hard time to have a blob.

S3 has such a credibility and support gap that they really do need an open driver IMO - and the cards aren't popular enough to see a quick open implementation even if they gave full specs. There are orders of magnitude more r6xx-r8xx cards in both user and developer's hands...

[Adarion]

Knowing how bad their windows drivers are, I'd say they're too embarrassed to release it in public :D

Subscribed.
I wondered about all these people here telling how lame AMD would be not having VDPAU support. First, VDPAU ist still nvidia territory so I can understand that they rather want to have their own implementation of these features. But most ridiculous I find people cheering about S3. I mean, what exactly really happened? A few lines somewhere in a changelog? Okay. But I will not believe a single byte of that unless someone independent proves that this will really work on any generic distribution with any generic unpatched tools. Be it OpenCL, VDPAU or whatever.
VIA & S3 is a shit when it comes to drivers. They may say they have this and that but that does not mean that it will work on your very box nor anyone else's outside S3/VIA.
I mean I burst in tears of joy whenever I even see a working MPEG2 acceleration on a VIA GPU.
These chips may be cheap and consume not much power but sadly that is all.