Mesa Kills Old Hardware Support: No More 3dfx Voodoo

[Med_]

sloccount in the mesa directory says.

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic:       722185 (87.60%)
cpp:          71777 (8.71%)
python:       13576 (1.65%)
asm:           7634 (0.93%)
sh:            4713 (0.57%)
yacc:          3683 (0.45%)
lex:            831 (0.10%)
perl:            11 (0.00%)
lisp:             3 (0.00%)

That means roughly 10% of loc vanished. That's a pretty impressive cleanup.

[psycho_driver]

Has there been any talk of maintaining a legacy 7.11 branch for people with the older hardware? I have a 3dfx v3 3000 pci which I keep around in case of main card failure. I was throwing together PCs the other day out of spare parts and actually used it briefly. I think I even got compositing working in E17+ecomorph (I know I did with a Geforce2 MX, which was a little surprising).

[Med_]

Has there been any talk of maintaining a legacy 7.11 branch for people with the older hardware?

Given that these drivers have not been maintained in years i would be surprised to suddenly see people stepping up to maintain them.

[pipe13]

Am wondering if decimal point is missing. Still have bunch 2MB Millenium MGA PCI cards kicking around for testing and other emergencies. Two of them reside in the workstation from which I write, which does have an empty AGP slot but what would be the point? Will 2D drivers indeed still be around? lsmod shows:

matroxfb_base           19520  1 
matroxfb_DAC1064          8253  1 matroxfb_base
matroxfb_accel            3219  1 matroxfb_base
matroxfb_Ti3026           4153  1 matroxfb_base
matroxfb_g450             4656  1 matroxfb_base

[birdie]

Here's another instance of praised backwards compatibility in Linux.

Not enough man power? Ditch it!

[grok]

I had an ATI rage pro that ran pretty well, after selling a GT240 for money - I didn't need such power given they are very few games worth running. but there was no 3D support already.

I've had a radeon 7000 too, which did have OpenGL support : that only got used in vlc and zsnes!, as a workaround for abnormal 2D slowness and freezes. quake 3 / openarena was unplayable, and dark with the gamma correction not working. complete shit, you wouldn't get that result on windows 98 or XP.

so in many cases, we're losing unusable or non existent 3D drivers.
the 3dfx, I will miss. not the terrible support for voodoo2 (I wasted a few hours of my life), but the one for voodoo3 - I had openarena fly on it on ubuntu 8.04.

funnily, I'm now running a 8400GS and the open source 3D driver was slow and bad (still that gamma bug). voodoo3 does run better despite considerably weaker hardware
my only way out was, no suprise, nvidia binary driver.

[jhansonxi]

The 3dfx drivers were really buggy but usable. The Rage drivers worked with some applications but had time-out issues (according to Xorg.0.log) with others. There were graphics problems with some games like Neverball that appeared to be issues with GPU texture size limits. There were also the old problems with 3D acceleration supported only in specific bit depths.

I'll miss the old i810 driver. It actually worked with i8xx integrated graphics, unlike the current drivers.

Good riddance to Via and SiS drivers. I wouldn't use that junk with Windows either.

[DeepDayze]

Given that these drivers have not been maintained in years i would be surprised to suddenly see people stepping up to maintain them.

I would say these drivers could be maintained out of the tree though, so maybe there might be a parallel 7.11 mesa-legacy branch for those old legacy drivers.

[DeepDayze]

The 3dfx drivers were really buggy but usable. The Rage drivers worked with some applications but had time-out issues (according to Xorg.0.log) with others. There were graphics problems with some games like Neverball that appeared to be issues with GPU texture size limits. There were also the old problems with 3D acceleration supported only in specific bit depths.

I'll miss the old i810 driver. It actually worked with i8xx integrated graphics, unlike the current drivers.

Good riddance to Via and SiS drivers. I wouldn't use that junk with Windows either.

maybe someone could fix those bugs to make them usable at least...the tdfx and ATI rage chips were pretty good for their time

Keeping the S3 Savage drivers would be nice too, as several old laptops have these chips

[Tgui]

Time moves on!

Still, I remember buying a 3dfx card just so I could play quake/q2/arena in Linux in undergrad. Fuck I'm getting old! ;-)