ATI Rage128 Driver Now Has RandR Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI Rage128 Driver Now Has RandR Support

For anyone still using the ATI Rage 128 graphics card, there's been a rare update to the xf86-video-r128 X.Org driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xorg-R128-New-Release

[TheSoulz]

Awesome, i love that these GPUs are still getting love.
I myself have a few of these old pices of history and its always nice to know they still work (probably even better then when they were made).

[duby229]

I had a Rage128 Pro when I first learned about linux. At that time all there was for modesetting was vesa at 640x480 and nothing else. It was about 1998 and trying to get KDE working on that card was a nightmare. At the same time, I was playing Baldurs Gate on win95 with it. And BeOS at least had 1024x768 support, but only in monochrome.....

Oh how times have changed.

[mememe]

Wow, I still have an old computer (from 2000) with a Rage 128-based graphics card sitting here, collecting dust. I wanted to remove the hard disk tomorrow and then throw it in the trash, but now that there is a Rage 128 driver with RandR support I may have to change my plans. Nah, just kidding, that thing is too old and too slow to do anything useful, and not ancient enough to be a historical piece of PC hardware.

[dungeon]

I guess TnT vs Rage benchmarks coming very soon

[schmidtbag]

What I'd really like to know is what was the actual reason behind adding this? Even if there is anybody who is still using this GPU, why do they have the need for RandR? If for some reason they need an ancient system that also needs screen rotation, why not just slap in a PCI or AGP card? There are GPUs that use the AGP socket that are still updated by the open source drivers for both AMD and nvidia. But if for some reason they don't want to do this because it taints the history of the computer, I'm not aware of Rage supporting screen rotation in Windows either.

[schmidtbag]

I guess TnT vs Rage benchmarks coming very soon

That would have actually made a pretty entertaining April Fools article.

[Gusar]

What I'd really like to know is what was the actual reason behind adding this? Even if there is anybody who is still using this GPU, why do they have the need for RandR? If for some reason they need an ancient system that also needs screen rotation, why not just slap in a PCI or AGP card? There are GPUs that use the AGP socket that are still updated by the open source drivers for both AMD and nvidia. But if for some reason they don't want to do this because it taints the history of the computer, I'm not aware of Rage supporting screen rotation in Windows either.

RandR doesn't do just rotation, it also does resizing (hence the name - Resize and Rotation) and multi-monitor. That's the main thing here, the custom dual-head code in the driver was replaced with RandR. This way one can use standard interfaces and tools (for example the GUI that comes with the DE) to configure screen resolution and dual-head, instead of needing a driver specific xorg.conf.

As to the question of why not a modern AGP or PCI card, simple, they cost money. Maybe you could get lucky and find someone selling a used card for really cheap, but why go through the hassle if the card you already have can still be used.

[GreatEmerald]

OpenGL 1.2, eh? Well, that's too bad, because I recently updated DArcomage to only work on OpenGL 1.4, because I need mipmap support. Sorry, Rage128 users

[schmidtbag]

RandR doesn't do just rotation, it also does resizing (hence the name - Resize and Rotation) and multi-monitor. That's the main thing here, the custom dual-head code in the driver was replaced with RandR. This way one can use standard interfaces and tools (for example the GUI that comes with the DE) to configure screen resolution and dual-head, instead of needing a driver specific xorg.conf.

I'm aware, but I figured it would be possible to at least set a fixed resolution higher than 640x480 in xorg.conf. These GPUs to my knowledge didn't have multi-monitor support, so that feature isn't necessary.

As to the question of why not a modern AGP or PCI card, simple, they cost money. Maybe you could get lucky and find someone selling a used card for really cheap, but why go through the hassle if the card you already have can still be used.

If funding is the only problem here, it is far less cost effective to operate a late 90s PC than it is to buy a crappy ARM-based device. I mean that in both power consumption and time being used to operate it (in the sense that "time is money", because these computers were pretty slow). There are people today who trash computers where the CPU alone could render graphics more detailed than what a Rage128 could render.

The point is - if you can't spend $30 on a used AGP card to obsolete a 20-year-old GPU on a computer you expect to be using regularly, you probably shouldn't be owning a computer. Buy a $5 flash drive, back up your stuff, junk your PC, and go to the library if you really need to be saving that much money. I have nothing against people who want to use something old, but when you have a computer that old and you expect it to do modern things, that's just plain dumb.