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X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)
X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)
Posted Feb 8, 2006 9:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: X graphics get a boost (NewsForge) by mattdm
Parent article: X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)
This stuff should run fine on a ATI 9200-style card...
As far as open source drivers you have ones for Via and Intel cards. Intel's 915 and 945 "Graphic media accelerator" cards should offer significant performance improvements over their 845 "Blaster Extreme" cards.
Look for them when buying a laptop. Current "Sonoma"-style "Centrino" laptops offer a platform that uses fully open source drivers for all of the hardware and should have good power management features.
Wireless and Video as well as the rest of the system can be used using fully open source drivers.
Beware of buying cards with ATI video card or broadcom wireless. You'll see laptops labled 'centrino' with ATI or Nvidia video cards.. but all 'centrino' will have intel for wireless. It's part of the requirement for licensing the trademarks.
This XGLX isn't going to help out much since it's a full screen hack that runs on a regular X server, but once you get fully standalone X servers it should make it significantly easier to get full featured drivers for Linux. Both for Free software and propriatory driver makers.
Also be sure to write "alternative" card manufacturers.
XGI made significant noise about releasing Free software drivers. They have fully free DRM (not digital rights-related) for the Linux kernel and they open source'd the drivers for 2-d.. however the DRI part is closed source.
They haven't sold shit for new cards against ATI or Nvidia in Windows. And on the low end they are competiting against Intel and Via (which they'll loose).
Make sure that they know that there is a market for fully open sourced drivers. And that it is critical for 3d support for things like XGL.
Their top of the line descrete cards don't compare to ATI or Nvidia, but are significantly faster then the embedded cards from Intel and especially Via.
They need to know that if they open source the DRI portion of the drivers that they WILL have a market from Free software folks. Even if this market is only 5-7% compared to what Nvidia has it will be much more then XGI has right now!
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=32...
If they are able to make money simply because they used open source drivers it will help to show that end users actually care about that sort of thing and follow through with $$.
Same thing for other manufacturers that provide Free drivers themselves, like Ralink with their rt2500 wireless chipsets.
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X graphics get a boost (NewsForge)
Posted Feb 8, 2006 15:12 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]
As far as open source drivers you have ones for Via and Intel cards. Intel's 915 and 945 "Graphic media accelerator" cards should offer significant performance improvements over their 845 "Blaster Extreme" cards.
I would really, really love to see a thorough benchmark comparison of all the current open source graphics options -- like, how much are the "significant performance improvments"? How does that compare to the Radeon 9200 series? And how does that compare to, say, an ATI Radeon 8500 from a few years ago? And then, how do all of those compare to the propriatary drivers, both on the same hardware where that's a possibility and on the latest and greatest hardware?
I would actually pay money to see this.