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Matrox Releases XFree86 4.0.1 Driver 90

Posted by HeUnique from the excellent! dept.
As the title says - Matrox has released a beta driver for their G200/G400/G450 which includes support for DualHead and QuadHead (up to 4 monitors), Flat Panel and TV out. This driver is a beta. You can get it here and I mirrored it here. You'll need XFree 4.0.1 in order to use this driver. Please follow the readme file carefully! (the readme file from Matrox's FTP needs to be converted dos2unix). Note: you cannot use the 3D hardware acceleration on the 2nd monitor (yet).Matrox & Precision insight - Keep up the good work!
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Matrox releases XFree86 4.0.1 driver More

Matrox releases XFree86 4.0.1 driver

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  • There is a binary-only *.a library in there which actually drives the new features their driver actually adds. So this driver looks not to be open source to me. :-)

    Look at the DRI project's developer mailing list archives [geocrawler.com]. There's a message from Jeff Hartmann hinting that the source for the HAL will be relesed eventually, too. (Wait for the archive to be updated, the message is fairly recent, that's the reason I can't provide a direct link to it)

  • As long as 4.0.1 compiles properly.

    Rename your old X dirs ! before install.
  • I've got a G400 Max and it totally kicks ass. I'm currently using XF3.3.6 with Utah GLX, but I see that there's a DRI module for the G400 in the latest test kernels, so as soon as that settles down a bit, I'll snarf XF 4.x and give it a shot. Currently I get nice snappy accelerated 3D and can run 2D at any resolution and refresh rate that any monitor I can get in the next 5 years can handle. I bought the card specifically because Matrox has traditionally been very Linux friendly.

    On the down side, I sent them an E-Mail asking how the Rainbow Runner works in Linux and I never heard back from them. Pity. I was all set to drop some cash for a TV capture card (I since got diverted and haven't investigated that scene for a while.)

  • I'm not sure if its posible... But why not integrate dual monitor support into linux. I have a mac and it was obsencenly easy to add a second card (Just plug and go...)
    It works great, except the menu bar doesn't float with applications but you get used to that. I love dual monitor set ups.

    I don't know enough about X to know if its posible
  • The G400 works just fine under FreeBSD with XFree86 4.0.1, including DRI-based 3D support. We also support voodoo3. Other drivers will probably follow when I work out a way to share more of the driver source code betweem the two operating systems.

  • What this proves... (Score:4)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @05:56AM (#849605) Homepage Journal
    ...is that the new driver model for XFree86 v4 is something that works. Hardware manufacturers can now ship one driver, and not worry about which distributions to target (or even Linux vs. BSD issues, because they all use the same driver model). See that? When third parties have a single target, they ship stuff. When faced with fragmentation, they only sometimes ship stuff, and when they do, it's usually only for the most popular marget segment (cf. all the third party software advertised as "For Red Hat Linux"). Way to go, XFree (and Precision Insight, which contributed the module loader).
    --
  • They're not really available yet (just a beta version but you can't upgrade from the old debs, it's seperate), but check www.debian.org/~branden for updates.

  • I've got a single-head G400, so the dualhead support doesn't appeal to me as much as increased 3d performance and the ability to run in 32bpp mode. Unfortunately, when I downloaded the binary and put it where Matrox said to, everything fell back to software 3d rendering, and the driver continued to complain about 32bpp not being supported. Am I missing something obvious? Has anyone gotten 32bpp and/or 3d out of this driver?
  • Who uses that?
    What's wrong with

    perl -pi -e 's/\r//'

    ?
  • The G400/450 is a dual-head AGP card, not so? So how do you do Quad-head? Do you need a motherboard with two AGP slots? Do they make such a beast?
  • Right now, the only dual-monitor support is in X :(. Well, there is dual-headed MDA support in the kernel, but I think that's only monochrome text, so its use is pretty limited.

    But yeah. I don't really like X, so if video goodness (such as dual-headedness) were to be added to the kernel, I'd be happy.

  • This on the same day that my NVidia-based Guillemot 3d prophet DDR-DVI and my IBM T86D arrive. I'm using them at this very moment, and loving it. I'll have to get a Matrox G400 and DVI daughtercard now, just for comparison :)
  • My two cents... Math Faq on Polygons [swarthmore.edu]
  • Well, you could always run opengl apps and see how they handle. Duh!

    Maybe it's not the best benchmark, but running simple linux games like quake3, heavy gear 2 and the like are reasonable judges of how well a 3d card will perform under linux.

    I have now tried almost every major brand of card on my machine, and without a question, for games and standard opengl, Nvidia's drivers, in the case of the TNT2 and the Geforce2 I've tried, kick butt.

    Try running the program "mtri" under your mesa's demo dir. Make sure to link it to the right opengl libs. Like magic, you can see how many triangles your card can push in-window (which is slower than full screen btw).

    In window, the Matrox G400 I tried scored about 1m triangles. The Nvidia geforce score more than that, by almost 3.5 times! (taken at 32-bit color 1280x1024 on an athalon t-bird 800 w/ 256 megs pc100 ram, for those who care). The TNT2 scores at just below 2mtri. For reference, the Voodoo3 3000 scored just below the TNT2, at about 1.8 mtri (this test was done in 16-bit color tho, so ymmv).

    That's plenty enough benchmarking for me. Code I write runs well with one card, and at 1/4 speed on a Matrox card. Now, don't get me wrong. I love Matrox. I think it's admirable what they are doing, and I plan to buy a g450 w/ dual heading for my workstatin computer because dual monitors make coding easier. But for raw 3d performace, both in games and simulations, nvidia cards give you the best performance you are going to get on an x86 machine, open source or closed.
    - Paradox
    Man of the C!!!
  • I like that they are getting their act together with Linux drivers, but talk about one screwed up company who still doesn't have drivers out for W2K after 8 months. Sounds like they need to hire some more people to develop drivers.

    If they take as long as they did with the W2K drivers then you won't see their final Linux version anytime soon. The only benifit is that you can get the source and fix it yourself before they will ever be done.
  • I'm honestly interested, if you've tried this... How well does GLX work over two discrete video cards in a dual headed config? The Xi Graphics people had a demo at LinuxWorld showing a G400 dual head doing 3D accel spanning both screens flawlessly. Loki had Flight Gear running on what the demonstrator called a dual headed G400 as well, though I believe it was just mirroring at the time for the projector. Pretty nifty stuff that didn't look too bad at all...
  • Hopefully they will allow their source to be publicly modified, as video drivers can make or break a graphics card.

    Look at the DRI project website [sourceforge.net] (yes, I know, I have said this a gazillion times already). They developed these drivers, and the license is the XFree86 license, i.e., you can't get more free than that.

  • There was a press release that Precision Insight will do DRI drivers for G400 (most probably under the GPL), and they promised them for this summer. Wonder what happened to them.

    Download the source from Matrox, download the source from DRI's CVS [sourceforge.net]. Run diff. Modulo the HAL, these are just about the same drivers.

  • Not to be a bitch but.....Great README (Score:3)

    by bfree ( 113420 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @02:29AM (#849618)
    The README file in the linked tgz states that the driver is for the Millenium (I and II) and the Mystique....no mention of the G400 or multihead or tv or ........
    That said, I am still dying to get my hands on a good graphics card for Linux (it would be nice if it would do BSD and Be but Linux is _my_ OS of choice) and this is starting to sound closer to the mark. Anyone able to offer any real feedback on what this can do? The one thing we are really missing now in terms of X Video Card support is a "Tom's Hardware" site which reviews the cards and drivers so that we can all find out what features we can expect to get out of modern cards under XFree and what sort of performance they offer (primarly of interest vis-a-vis OpenGL frame rates and dvd playback cpu loads, but scalability (1head - 4 heads + tv) and video capture performance (achievable undropped data rates, resolution and frame rates). Anyone able to write useful benchmarks for any of these areas...if so please do and send them to Tom GPL'd (and/or anyone else you think might take this on).
    The debate over Nvidia's open V closed drivers is so virulent because we do not have any good performance comparisons, and also because support for features beyond standard 2d and 3d are essentially undocumented/unsupported and therefore it is difficult to determine what features you would get out of your ATI All in Wonder 128 (to take what I feel is a good example) if you use it under linux without just buying one.
    If Linux (and really the free OSs as a whole) wants to be any more mainstream for "home" users and not simply as a second OS on a machine designed for Windows, we need to start gathering up the hardware and driver (the two are inexorably intertwined for Free OSs) information so that people buying a PC can quickly see what there machine will/should do under their OS of choice. The vital areas are video and sound, but other items such as Nics and capture cards would be beneficial.
    If such a site already exists please post the url:-)
  • Well, but where the hell is 3D acceleration - the thing my G400 was bought for? And why the @#$% to use this beta driver when it is possible to grab Utah-GLX, which is rock stable and provides accelerated OpenGL?

    Look at the DRI Project website [sourceforge.net], read the docs. Read them again. Then come back and complain. OpenGL hardware acceleration works. You just have to read the documentation to get it going. Or if you don't want to upgrade to XFree86 4.0 just yet, keep using the Utah drivers, they are just as good.

  • I tried fiddling with utah-GLX on the pinstripe release with limited success (some apps worked, most didn't). But I see the pinstripe is using 3.3.6 but has most of 4 installed. Anyone go the
    rest of the way and try this out?

    -Mark

  • My father uses OS/2 as his primary OS (I choose Linux), and he runs a G200 PCI as his graphics card. He's never had the slightest problem with the driver support. At all.

    Oh, well. Speaking of OS/2, the interface is very VERY nicely designed. If I could get GTK+ to look and feel like that, I would be very happy indeed.

    Suggestion to IBM: Work with the GNOME guys or something and try and get us an OS/2-like interface for Linux!

    Yeah, I'm way off topic. So there. :-P


    -RickHunter
  • The links are all good. The troll is our helpful find. I thought I would find his improved links on his post. Maybe he just saw glx in the address and assumed .cx.

  • I tried to install this for my G400 Dual Head. After upgrading X to 4.0.1, I set up my dual screen's per the instructions, but I just get the following error:

    Fatal server error:
    Caught signal 11. Server aborting

    The logs seem to show everything working perfectly fine.

    Anyone get this to work in Dual Head?
  • Ummm, I have what you listed here (ok I have the video card that is the step up from your's with Composite Video out and 32 meg ram) and have ZERO problems. in fact it works great! as for the PP zip drive, it works as fast as the Win-crap drivers (although I dont use it anymore... i got a SCSI internal Zip now... 70000% faster) Parallel scanner works ok, printer- well I bought a real printer and not some win-crap, but then I'm an educated consumer. Oh and my IDE cdrw works great :-) Yes it's IDE. AS for the Rewritable function.. only a moron would want that to work - I buy CD blanks for 39 cents each so using a RW is just stupid.

    Sounds like someone dont want to take the time to make his wacked hardware work.
  • I've built and run at least 3 dualhead systems.

    all used 2 matrox cards of various memsizes and speeds.

    as I understand it, even the 400 series is junk for dual head accel. use. so for me, its still "chew up an agp AND a pci slot for 2 video outs". oh well.

    I do remember when matrox was on the shit-list for linux and xfree86 (oh, back in 95 or so). now, as far as I'm concerned, they're the card-of-choice for anything linux (or freebsd, etc).

    ati varies too much. S3 used to be cool but that was many yrs ago. and all the other players are 3d based (and when moving xterms around, who cares?)

    btw, the last xfree that correctly implemented dualhead with a pair of matrox cards was 3.9.16. nothing newer works for me and I'm still using that quite old beta. in a production environment, no less! ;-)

    --

  • hummm, on my machine, pinstripe installed both but uses X4.0.1. Check your /var/log/X* log and see what the version it reports is. It should be X4.
  • Good info :-)
    Where I see the problem, and what I was trying to draw attention to with my post, is not in determining which graphics card has the best 3d performance but in determining which cards support what features (on what platforms) and how these features perform. In windows land you can buy a video card to handle 2d, 3d, video IO and dual-heading and know in advance what sort of performance you should achieve. If I want to know the same for linux I can't (at least not before I buy the card and stick it in my machine)! I can find out if a card has dri support (or some other form of hardware accelerated 3d) and I can figure out what sort of 2d modes it can support, but discovering what features have hardware acceleration and which don't is a non-trivial task (I haven't spent long looking at dri opensource site but it seems to only have mailing lists). Discovering if a cards video facilities are accessable is again much more difficult, for example you may know that a card will capture video in full-screen PAL, but will the linux drivers do it and if so in what formats and at what performance loads.
    In summary, 2d graphics card performance has reached a very mature level where nearly any supported card will provide reasonable performance for all but the most demanding of applications (full-screen mpeg playback may push some cards beyond their abilities and not through the MPEG decoding which could be host processor based but through drawing the volume of final data). 3d performance is starting to become formalised and as such we need information on which cards support what features and how well they perform. Video4Linux should be providing us with some control over capture and output devices, but which consumer devices are supported and what will they do. We need a linuxhardware site which says that A is supported by B and will do C with D overheads, then we can all start to make some reasonably informed decisions about what video card to buy, and stop basing our decisions on the lowest common denominator of 2d and 3d support (and perhaps some of Tom's nice Quake III stats). Bemchmarking is the second stage, figuring out what a card will do is the first.
  • It was stated a *LONG* time ago that the production drivers will be open source. It was also stated that the alpha/beta releases would be closed.
    HAND
  • No, AGP is limited to two slots. However, (under Win98 at least) you should be able to just get a PCI (there is no Gxxx in PCI though) card and run dual monitors that way.
  • Isn't that ironic, that the DRI driver only does 16bpp when a major attraction of the Gxxx series is the great 32bit color quality?
  • This just fucking about time ROCKS.... I'm going out right now and buying a 17" monitor that can do 1280X1024 at a nice refresh. I do both. sysadmin and dev. I have a bunch of apps running displaying system usage. and then there's XFMAIL, gaim, Xchat, and other misc things that keep loaded all the time... This way I can monitor thoese things with out cluttering up the desktop Currently I'm running with a 19" monitor with 1600X1200. things get messy. real messy. this will just make things more simple and productive. What would be really cool is if I nca drag things from display :0.1 to :0.0 and vice-versa... is that possible? Yet another cool thing would be to get several G200's. and USB keyboards's and mice to match the amount of G200's/monitors.... and have a nice full color. ful mouse terminal system. :).. once 3D stuff is set... you hook all this up to a quad XEON machine and you can have one machien with 6 ppl doing graphic design or something :).
  • Our hero clicks on the DRI Project [sourceforge.net] page and breaks into a sweat.

    Just what I've been looking for! Oh, yeah! Thanks for posting!

    Good-bye free time, hello carpal tunnel.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • I hope this driver proves stable, as I would hate to give up the speed it allows. For 2D, the G200 is a cheap and capable card, but the driver with XF4.0 was so slooow. Waiting 15 seconds for the stipling to fill in when exiting from Sawfish @1600x1200 was getting on my nerves. Now it takes less than 1/2 sec.

    Way to go Matrox!
  • ROFL

    I love your sig. :)

    Red Green fans seem rather rare around here, yes? Pity...
  • Why bother waiting for the whole Perl interpreter to start up just to convert some line breaks?

    $ tr -d '\r' README.linux

  • Ah, wonderful Slashdot--the uninformed leading the uninformed. You don't even sound like you're certain whether MDA is just monochrome text or not, do you?

    Anyway, the matroxfb driver in the kernel has supported multihead (with multiple boards) for at least a year or two, and has supported G400 dualhead operation since kernel 2.3.43 or so.

    HTH. HAND.
  • Don't know about your dvd-drive, but mine reads cdr's just fine. It's a Pioneer drive.
  • Take a look at this file mga_1_0_beta. tgz [matrox.com]

    /per

  • So, do we think the driver will be open source or not? Would it be an advantage for the matrox team if it was as they'd get help improving it, or would they be giving out too much information about their hardware?

  • I would really appreciate if you know of some place where I could get info on how to achieve
    accelerated 3d with my matrox g400.
    I compiled XFree 4.0.1 using the ports collection, since there were no binary packets for 4.0.1.
  • Look again..

    I posted the link and the there is a .tgz file with the source code.
  • Good
    Things like this are great this allows linux users to worry less about being able to use video cards.

    Bad
    No source hardware drivers cause the biggest problem in system stablity if thier is a problem it can take long to fix.
  • I've been running dual-head off my G400 Max for a few hours now, and it appears to work fine so far. One snag: The driver will gladly attempt higher resolutions, but I've noticed problems with anything greater than 1024x768x16 on both monitors. It feel SO GOOD to have that second monitor back up...

  • Re:The good and bad of this (Score:4)

    by ambient13 ( 223454 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @01:44AM (#849644)
    Hopefully they will allow their source to be publicly modified, as video drivers can make or break a graphics card.

    One of the major problems with OS/2 was the video drivers. With good drivers it was rock-solid, but with the matrox drivers I had to use it crashed regularly - I eventually found this was the driver and not OS/2. But because Matrox regarded OS/2 as unimportant they never updated them - this was the main reason I abandoned it. If a Windows user tries Linux and discovers it crashes all the time because of an old driver - they're unlikely to come back.

    If Matrox want the unix world to use their cards they'll have to release the sources.

    -----
  • that's strange, I'm dualhead on a G400 vanilla and I have 1600x1200x16 on one and 1280x1024x16 on another.
  • Perhaps they could open source part of it somehow, so that any bits with their sensitive secrets in were kept under wraps, but everyone could benefit from open source developement of the rest of the drivers.
  • I've got a Matrox G400 DualHead (running under 2k admittedly), but the reason there is no acceleration for the second monitor is becuase the second monitor isn't actually accelerated on the card.

    Yes this sucks, even the mouse pointer on the second monitor isn't accelerated, its done entirely in software. You can look forward to lots of pointer flicker on rapidly refreshing windows (like video) with this card.

  • QuadHead, kinda makes you think of the matrix doesn't it? Go Matrox, We want IsocaHead cards for that real Matrix feel!
  • There is a binary-only *.a library in there which actually drives the new features their driver actually adds. So this driver looks not to be open source to me. :-)
  • You got it wrong.
    The second head have no hardware cursor, but acceleration has nothing to do with the RAMDAC...

    Simplified it looks like this:
    Accelerator renders into card memory.
    RAMDAC reads data from card memory and sends it to the screen.
    In the case of the G400 you have two ramdacs but that doesn't stop the second head from having accelerated graphics. (I don't know what they've done in their windows drivers of course.)

  • Re:No 3D acceleration??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You get support for the second head? And it _is_ a beta release... 3d support should be there in the final release.
  • All programs that used MesaGL, stopped working after I upgraded to XF4.0. All I got was a core dump.

    The new XFree 4.0.1 has now fixed this problem. So I think you should try that one.
  • I think his point is that this driver just disables the ability to use 3D. I just installed it, an DRI doesn't work anymore. (Oh .. ok it did not before either, but now it doesn't crash, I only get software rendering ;)
    Samba Information HQ
  • I have a Prophet II (gotta love Guillemot and their metallic blue PCB's, right...err...anyways).

    What nasty things have you heard? I've yet to have a problem with their drivers. Actually, there was 1 problem (X using libglx.so and the nvidia drivers having a .a, that conflicted if you didn't remove X's lib) but that was a 1 second fix.

  • Anyone try this in *BSD Yet? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've been looking for a good dual-monitor card for our FreeBSD dev workstations at work.. anyone try this yet? This *should* work due to the awesowe platform (though architecture) independant modules for XFree86 4.X.

    Too bad the Riva TNT drivers don't use the XFree86 4.X drivers. Matrox not only gets kudos for using the XF86 module, but for releasing the source code! This is how it's supposed to be. Take notes NVIDIA.

    If this does indeed work in FreeBSD, Matrox is going to get some business! Trying to sell the company into buying a bunch of workstations from hardware.bsdi.com that come w/ the dual-head cards. And if it doesn't work, we've got the source code to make it work :)

  • Re:Enjoy your VoodooX then.... (Score:4)

    by Strog ( 129969 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @05:20AM (#849656) Homepage Journal
    Because Nvidia is much worse about binary drivers. ATI could be another alternative depending on what your are looking for. Matrox has given back to Linux and they are working on doing more but it would really suck if they did something stupid like releasing things they license from other people. Let them work out the legal details so they can do it right. I'd hate to see any company get shutdown because of legal problems just so you can have source. Ok, I might cry less if I didn't see another Trident or Savage chipset but I still would some. Just be patient with these companies. It takes a lot of work to turn one of these big ships and I believe that Matrox is coming on around. Hopefully Nvidia is making the swing too but it will take time to work out the legal issues. Have faith.
  • I beta tested the drivers and wrote an article for an upcoming Maximum Linux issue. I have a couple of screenshots of the G400 running xinerama if anyone is interested.

    xinerama.jpg [pobox.com] and
    xinerama2.jpg [pobox.com]

    enjoy!

  • I should take the time to look this up myself, but were can I get .deb files for XFree86 4.0.1?
  • AS for the Rewritable function.. only a moron would want that to work - I buy CD blanks for 39 cents each so using a RW is just stupid.

    Or maybe someone who is a little more conscious about the tons of waste s/he already produces each year? Or someone who knows those (cyanide-containing) CDR's are not really that harmless when burned or stashed away in some garbage dump? Or someone who wants to use the disks in a DvD-drive (which, as you may know, can not read CDR's but has no problems with CDRW)?

    Please think for a minute before calling someone who does not think like you a moron. I do not like being called a moron, and that goes for most people...

  • Dual and quad head video! I've been waiting for Matrox to have this, it was my last reason for still having that stinking Win machine at home (oh, ok, and to play The Sims, but that's different).

    Now I can use all my nice 19 inch monitors and do my web stuff in a realistic environment!

  • Do you have any URLs to back this up? I know it would help me feel a lot better about my G400. Thanks.

  • Summary and Warning (Score:3)

    by egnor ( 14038 ) on Thursday August 17, 2000 @08:05AM (#849663) Homepage

    There's a lot of confusion around here...

    1. This is not open source; it's an open source wrapper around a proprietary "HAL" library which Matrox distributes in binary-only form. This bad, not only for philosophical reasons, but because it leaves non-x86 users out in the cold.

    2. The G400 Dual-Head card does support acceleration on the second head, but the Windows drivers do not, which creates the common misconception that the second head is unaccelerated. Both heads share the same video RAM, and the accelerator can be used to write to either one. I don't know if the Linux drivers support acceleration on the second head.

    3. If you're looking for 3D, you can apparently get DRI drivers, or at least information about them, from dri.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]. With a stock XF86 4.0.1 (without this driver!), I have DRI working on my G400. It's not terribly fast, but it's cute (accelerated 3D in a window!).

    4. These drivers crashed my machine! It seems that no matter what I do, as soon as I launch X with this .o file, my machine locks solid. I have one G400 dualhead and one MII (which I've been using to drive the second head, waiting for dualhead support). Has anyone had the same experience?

  • I started X with 'startx -- +xinerama' per HOWTO instructuctions with the same result.

    I installed using the binary packages from xfree86.org - is an install from source in order?

  • Good cards for Linux are definitley the NVidia cards (open vs. closed-issue aside) they provide you with good drivers and have a great performance.
    Tom's Hardware even tested the GeForce 2 in Linux(!): http://www.tomshardware. com/graphic/00q3/000811/index.html [tomshardware.com]
    and you _can_ compare it (using Quake 3 in Windows and Linux), which he did.
  • Look, some of us have real work to do. Yeah, in a perfect world, everything would be Open Source, and Matrox would release a graphic driver that wasn't binary-only.

    But it ain't a perfect world, you don't get a choice in the Win world, so deal with it.

    I'd much rather get the same level of code and quality code at that, than get no code.

    If you really wish there was an Open Source graphics driver for Matrox, start your own project now, instead of complaining. Crank out some code of your own - how do you think we got DVD?

    The world is harsh sometimes, but I'd rather have some code as a wrapper than none at all.

  • In addition to the G400 and G450, this driver supports the G200, which is available in quadhead. Indeed, the G200 itself supports up to four quadhead PCI boards in a single system to provide up to 16 displays. (Collect them all! Trade them with your friends!)

    I have no idea if XFree86 will happily support all 16 displays. I do know neither my bank account nor my desk will.

  • >btw, the last xfree that correctly implemented dualhead with a pair of matrox cards was 3.9.16. nothing newer works for me

    I am using a G400 AGP & a G200 PCI with 4.0.1.

    It works ok -- occasional crashes
  • Matrox has released fairly complete documentation for the G400, in fact sufficient documentation to make a very decent GLX driver and an accelerated server. I've downloaded and had a look at the PDF file. They've told their customers how their cards work. Why are they under any further obligation to give out their code?

    I prefer open source software, since it generally results in higher quality. I also believe that companies have an obligation to support their customers; for instance, NeoMagic has been very unhelpful with their specifications, and I think that sucks because their customers are the only reason they're in business. But Matrox has been helpful, and open source drivers have been written for most of their hardware. What's the problem, then, if they want to release their own binary-only driver?

    Way to go, Matrox. I own a G400 Max, and I'm very happy with it. Keep up the good work.

    -John
  • Goto http://www.matrox.com

    Look at the ... G200MAX - up to 4 monitors in one card!

    Also, there is a PCI version - so you could put up to 16 monitors on 1 PC! (their X driver supports it)
  • there's no real excuse for not getting a matrox card to work under whatever os you are using(as long as that os tells you how to write drivers).
    other than lazyness (my self included here).

    matrox release there chip set info and some other tools to go with it.

    infact I'm sure i got an email the other day about the g800 chip set info being available soon or maby it was the g450?

    anyhow were all to lazy so matrox had to write the driver themselves.

    well done matrox, more beer and sleep for me.
  • Gosh, this looks a lot like source code: HALlib README mga.cpp mga_bios.h mga_dga.c mga_driver.c mga_macros.h mga_shadow.c mga_video.c mga_wrap.h Imakefile client.h mga.h mga_dac3026.c mga_dri.c mga_driver.c~ mga_map.h mga_storm.c mga_warp.c mgareg_flags.h Makefile clientlx.c mga_arc.c mga_dacG.c mga_dri.h mga_hwcurs.c mga_reg.h mga_ucode.h mga_wrap.c

    It didn't build for me because I don't have the XFree 4.0.x headers, but....

    *** Tough Love pinches himself & still doesn't quite believe he's not dreaming
    --

  • Untrue! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17, 2000 @02:04AM (#849673)
    They are certantly both hardware accelerated. The W2k driver just sucks. The dual head support on the max is implimented by have a single large frame buffer (drawn by one accel) and outputting it to two differnt ramdacs (who are windowed to only look at their part).

  • Keep up the good work Precision Insight! These drivers are developed by Presicion Insight, and other than the HAL, what Matrox released is more or less what's already available at DRI's CVS.

    Nevertheless, Matrox is to praise for releasing specifications that allowed people to write drivers for their hardware, including but not limited to the Utah GLX drivers [sourceforge.net], as well as for releasing source code [matrox.com] (not all of it, mind you, but information comming reliable sources [geocrawler.com] suggests it will be there eventually) along with this "beta" driver [matrox.com]. So, go, Matrox, go!

  • There was a press release [precisioninsight.com] that Precision Insight will do DRI drivers for G400 (most probably under the GPL), and they promised them for this summer.
    Wonder what happened to them.
  • Wow!
    I have gotten dual head once about a year ago and I was great!
    But I can imagine if I ever get quad head, no acceleration will be needed...
  • Can someone point to the original announcement?

    Last I knew, the DRI 3D driver for the G400 was rather incomplete. It did only 16bpp, and the basic stuff. The Utah-GLX driver is more complete, in that it does 32bpp as well, but there's a bunch of noise about it's ability to use/accelerate stencils.

    Even at that, there's not mention of extensions, like Environmental Bump Mapping, etc. (I know, do it, myself.)

    This is a good start. But the key word is, "start".
  • Hi Oliver,
    unfortunately, Matrox does not released specs
    for all parts of their G200/G400/G450 boards.
    I had to hack dualhead support for Linux
    matroxfb myself without any doc available from
    them. Not talking about that they DO NOT release
    which memory types they connect to on-shop
    devices, how fast are these cores and memories
    and so on.
    And BTW, I asked for engineering sample of G450
    more than 2 months ago, but they even did not
    bother with reply that they'll not send it to
    me. Just plain silence.
    And BTW#2, I do not think that mgaHALlib.a has
    something to do with open source. Not even
    saying that my PowerPC does not believe that
    i386 code is appropriate...
    Petr
  • I wanna try these baby's out, cant wait to get home heheh.

    This WILL rock for Blender addicts...
    I have this 22"inch tube, It really looks amazing these sample anims of bats nd stuff :0
    Hw accel at 1600 for modeler and desktop on 17"
    hell I 'm gonna suxor GIMP...this is gonna roxor :)
  • Code can also be found here [raleigh.nc.us].
  • Great. So now not only can companies release binary-only graphics drivers, it's actually expected. Matrox have just lost my business.

    And before you say "but the source is available", it isn't. The code in the tarball is just a wrapper around their "HAL" library.

    "I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
    "All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

  • Metrolink contributed the module loader.

    Precision Insight developed the direct rendering infrastructure currently only used for OpenGL.
  • Abstraction layer sure, but I didn't see anything about the warp in there... $ nm mgaHALlib.a ... 0000086c T MGASetMode 00000984 T MGASetTVMode ... 000008b4 T HSLCVE2EnableEncoder ... 00000f48 T HSLCVE2SetMacroVision 00000418 T HSLCVE2SetMacroVisionRegister 000006d8 T HSLDetectDVD 00000604 T HSLDetectMJPEG 00000b4c T HSLDetectMSP 00000128 T HSLDetectMaven 00000998 T HSLDetectPanelLinkModule 0000053c T HSLDetectRR2 00000fe8 T HSLDetectSIPanelLink 00000e68 T HSLDetectSecondHD15 00000c48 T HSLDetectTVTuner 00000330 T HSLDetectVideoDecoder ...
  • The G400 Dual-Head card does support acceleration on the second head, but the Windows drivers do not, which creates the common misconception that the second head is unaccelerated. Both heads share the same video RAM, and the accelerator can be used to write to either one. I don't know if the Linux drivers support acceleration on the second head.

    I've finally got it running!! (About damn time - the Mandrake X Setup has some goofy things that it took me forever. Developers - if your software dies because it can't find a file, *output an error*!).

    The above point is correct - G400's are accelerated on both heads. But the mouse pointer is hardware on one head, software on the other, resulting in bad flickering. Add to that the fact that Windows apparantly has problems with AGP dual head (one card manufacturer apparantly gets around it by dropping the AGP connection down to a PCI via hardware), and you've got a card that has the hardware to function nicely, but is difficult to write drivers for. (It occurs to me that you generally only need to have a pointer on one head at a time *anyway*, so...).

    I consider dualhead a "killer-app"... I ran MGA/CGA up through MGA/SVGA for years. Developing on only one monitor is (imho) like having sex with only one person involved (counting yourself).

    I jumped to Linux *because* of XFree 4.x's dualhead support. Since then, I've been miserably trying to get what works in Windows to work in Linux (two ATI card, or a Matrox G400).

    Oh, and to all the people who say that Matrox "sucks" - it's a nice, stable, single slot dual head. Since I've never installed Quake on any machine I've owned, and never even seen HalfLife running, I think it should allow for my gaming needs (Zork, corewars, and I've gotta get TradeWars 2002), in addition to letting me develop on two monitors.

    Of course, the first thing I did when X came back up was jump to Slashdot... lynx lacks that teal and white beauty. :)

    --
    Evan

  • Re:Drivers - specs! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe you don't know you can download _all_ of the register specs for the entire matrox videocard range from their developer site (free registration required)

  • Re:Drivers (Score:4)

    by m2 ( 5408 ) <[slashdot.org] [at] [spam.ksub.org]> on Thursday August 17, 2000 @02:09AM (#849686) Homepage Journal
    So, do we think the driver will be open source or not?

    Please look at the CVS tree of the DRI project [sourceforge.net], Matrox had worked together with Precision Insight to develop this drivers and the source is there. This particular release seems to be mising one bit (the HAL), but it looks like that will be released, too. Look at the DRI mailing list archives [geocrawler.com] if you want more info about the current status of the DRI.

  • Tucked away in a subdirectory:
    ls -l HALlib/mgaHALlib.a

    -rw-r--r-- 1 toughlove users 509216 Aug 10
    19:03 HALlib/mgaHALlib.a
    Half a meg of binary goop!
    --
  • Perhaps they could open source part of it somehow

    The one bit they haven't released is the documentation for the WARP engine, they have provided microcode that can be uploaded to the card instead. Other than that, the specs are there, and the source is there. Look at the DRI project pages [sourceforge.net] for more info.

  • Bad

    No source hardware drivers cause the biggest problem in system stablity if thier is a problem it can take long to fix.

    Look at the DRI project website [sourceforge.net]. The source is available via CVS.

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