[MPlayer-users] "shit" S3 drivers?

[Dan Hollis]

Forwarded reply from the S3 driver author...

-Dan
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On Wed, 31 Oct 2001 15:50:40 -0800 (PST), Dan Hollis wrote:
>
>Is what he says true? S3 doesn't release any specs?

He is correct.  S3 considers the chip specs for anything ViRGE or newer to be
proprietary, and will release them only under a non-disclosure agreement.
Even that doesn't guarantee it; I have both a contract and an NDA with S3,
and I haven't been able get the SuperSavage spec.

>Are the xfree S3 linux drivers "shit" like he says?

That's a difficult question to answer.  S3 doesn't actually do XFree86
drivers; they've all been developed outside.  The older chips have good
support in XFree86 3.3.6, because those specs were sometimes made freely
available.  The ViRGE driver in both 3.x and 4.x is pretty good; again, it
was developed outside S3.

I developed the Savage driver for 3.3.6 and 4.x under contract to S3.  The
Savage driver is pretty good, especially in 4.1.  There are still a couple of
issues with the xvideo support, but the issues are all system-dependent.  I
can't duplicate them here, which makes it pretty damn tough to fix them.

The big problem is that S3 no longer wants to pay me to keep the driver up to
date, and they do not have the incentive to do a quality job internally.
They (S3 themselves) added support for the SuperSavage to the XFree86 4.x
driver this summer, but instead of starting from the current XFree86 base,
they started from an old source drop I sent them last year.  Thus, their
"new" SuperSavage driver is missing a number of key bug fixes.

So, right now, I would say the XFree86 drivers are not shit, but the Savage
driver, at least, may be starting a slide into chaos and will probably be
orphaned before long.

--
- Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.