Linux Consumers Should Still Avoid S3 Graphics

[Kivada]

I was going to say, what Linux user can even FIND an S3 GPU to use? Outside of some very ancient IGPs in P4/Athlon XP era hardware their stuff is exceedingly hard to find.

A few years ago I went looking for one of their dedicated PCIe GPUs as they had supposedly released 2 models that where supposed to be competitive with the low end from AMD and NVidia. After a week of searching and finding no shop that carried them and only finding one small time review site that was even sent these GPUs I gave up.

If you are curious, heres the review of the S3 Chrome 500 series PCIe cards against what AMD and Nvidia cards where in the price range at the time. http://8000.hillbillyhardware.com:80...tx/540gtx.html

[AJenbo]

S3 trio. Holy crap, what is that, about 400 years old? Does it fit in an 8 bit ISA slot?

Actually this was the first card i bought back in the mid 90' and it was for PCI.

[boast]

I'm curious where VIA's x86 processors are used as well.

[AJenbo]

The zbox nettop uses via

[curaga]

I have an S3 and it works fine thank you very much.

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86c764/765 [Trio32/64/64V+]

Haha, I was about to post the same - S3 Trio64 works very much full-featured using FOSS.

[tomato]

Haha, I was about to post the same - S3 Trio64 works very much full-featured using FOSS.

It's easy to be full-featured if the only hardware acceleration you have is 2D...

but yeah, it's better than using the VESA mode/driver

[Adarion]

I'm curious where VIA's x86 processors are used as well.

Here. I had a laptop with a C3-2 (ECS G320) and I stil use a VIA C7 mainboard (miniITX) from Jetway. It's quite okay besides the mediocre GPU support. Low energy at their time for sure. And crypto accel. So nice for fileservers and with a good GPU they'd also be fine at HTPC but ... the GPU.
There is still quite a bunch of miniITX, pico/nanoITX and industrial boards featuring these chips.

I still own mainboards with and dedicated cards for ISA slot. Good old times where you had even the RTclock on a card ;-). If something was broken or too old you just replaced it or add something else. Very modular unlike today's stuff. Not enough slots. And I don't want PCIe. At least not for a stupid NIC that would even run full speed in an ISA slot. I have so many PCI cards why re-buy them in PCIe?

2D accel on VIA chips did also not always work. I had some releases that were okay on MPEG2 decoding, but also some where it was messed up. Sometimes it would freeze the whole box. Some drivers (libv's old one) wouldn't build with recent X and so on.