[MPlayer-users] "shit" S3 drivers?

[Arpi]

Hi,

> >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.

And what about YV12 support? The driver has very slow conversion code, it
should be optimized. And what about using DMA for vidoe transfer? It
eats too many CPU time now.

> 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.
hehe :)

> 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.

What about Xv support for Trio64 cards? AFAIK they have hardware YUV overlay
support. The drivers should support it.

And what about the very poor performance of AGP Trio3D/2x drivers? I required
5 times more CPU time to transfer a 320x200x32bpp image as my oldy PCI ET6000.
(it was with 4.0.2, maybe already fixed, but I already replaced that card by
ATI mach64)


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
mailto:arpi at thot.banki.hu
http://esp-team.scene.hu