S3 Tries to Get Back Into PC Graphics 171
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of S3's attempt to get some traction in the lower-end graphics card market, the Chrome S27. Though its specs look great--256MB memory, 700MHz core clock rate, 1.4GHz memory clock, and 22.4 GB/sec memory throughput, it still manages to underperform similarly priced video cards from the red and green graphics companies."
Free advice to S3... (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, I don't really see a downside, because who, besides free software lovers, would be motivated to buy something non-nvidia and non-ati at this point?
Cheers
Simon
Re:Free advice to S3... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gimme open drivers!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap Skates? (Score:2, Insightful)
People who do not play high-performance games might not want to pay $100-$600 for a graphics card. Joe User is far more interested in multimedia playback than 3D graphics. Intel's sells their embedded graphics cards for $7, and they are the biggest seller of graphics cards. Plus, they have open source drivers. There is plenty of room in the low-end for S3, although they have a lot of work ahead of them if they want to compete with Nvidia and ATI.
Re:Gimme open drivers!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously this would differentiate their product, and carve out a niche where that "big boys" seem to be ignoring. More importantly, if this product is new, then presumably they are currently in a position where they *can* conceivably open-source their driver. During any debate on open-sourcing video drivers, it is usually pointed out that doing so would be difficult, because sufficient documentation might not exist, or because of licensing issues, etc. However this new product line is at a stage where open-sourcing will yield the maximum return-on-investment. If they do it now, they will start getting 'free' software upgrades, bug fixes, documentation, and so on. This means their product will mature faster and they can close the gap with their competitors more quickly.
Frankly I think that would be an excellent move on their part. Without such an admittedly drastic move, their product has nothing new to offer and this product line will die off.
They should be thinking to themselves "imagine if our video card was the *default choice* for anyone selling or building a Linux or BSD system?" That's market differentiation right there.
Re:Free advice to S3... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't this be an excellent candidate for dual licensing? You know, one GPL'd and one commercial license. Either that, or nVidia/ATI would have to GPL *their* drivers as well, which doesn't seem very likely at this point.
Even if they were to release the souce you probably couldn't use it unless they granted some kind of license to use the patented algorithms freely. And they haven't done that to date despite lobbying by various people (including Alan Cox).
Again, could be limited to GPL/GPL-compatible licensed code. I mean, since nVidia/ATI already have the code under license, how many trade secrets could there possibly be left to protect?
Re:Free advice to S3... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's entirely possible to grant licenses for patents to some people and not others, for whatever reasons you like. It's not like copyrights or trademarks. IBM and CA are two companies that have granted licenses for open-source programs to use their patented technologies. S3 could hand out GPL code for it and grant a patentl license for use in open-source programs. Nvidia and ATI would still have to pay money to use it with their products and drivers.
Of course, people who actually know this have been saying it everytime someone says "open up the source!" to video card makers, and most people still don't get it. Sigh.
Maybe the people who keep bringing it up hope that S3 might have learned their lesson. Not yet, apparently, but it would be nice if they did. Good driver code really helps the hardware shine, and it's nontrivial to develop - as Nvidia and ATI have learned. But there are lots of clever students and other developers who would love to play with, grok, and improve such code.
Nvidia currently dominates the Linux 3d landscape because they have good drivers. If S3 came out with open ones, and even halfway-competitive hardware, they'd take that market, and get a significant number of people working on their drivers. Some of the improvements therefrom could benefit the Windows side, too. As others have noted, there's the Mac contigent, too, though I'm not sure how much they'd grab there - they don't tend to muck with their hardware so much.
Here's the thing with open-source drivers... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I do sympathize with linux users who want quality drivers for all types of graphics hardware. I doubt, though, that NVIDIA or ATI will ever release open-source drivers for linux. I think they can and should take the desktop linux market seriously and release high-quality, closed drivers, even if it affects the OSS purity of the linux operating system.
For decent article reviewing some of these issues, see this [zdnetasia.com].
No what we need (Score:4, Insightful)
So this is a situation where Linux needs to make a concession, if they want better support. This attitude of "open source always!" needs to give way to an attitude of choice. One where you provide all the tools necessary to do open distribution, and open distribution of your own tools, but the option to use closed source for those that want to.
If you don't want that, fair enough, but then you can't be too angry when the graphics companies won't accomadate you and your rather small marketshare. If you won't be accomadating to them, don't look at them to be accomidating to you.
Re:See the fanboys review! (Score:3, Insightful)
The ATI Radeon 1600Pro can be had for $99. The GF6600GT is $115.
they didn't pan it for performance, but for basic flaws?
Where'd you get that. In their conclusion they very clearly pan it for performance. It's not even the 2nd best card in its price range -- it's third best. By a large margin.
Ok, AA doesn't appear to work for GL, that is bad but will almost certainly get fixed in the drivers pretty soon.
Well that'd be new and different -- S3 actually fixing their drivers. I wouldn't hold your breath.
And it's worse than that, if you bother to read the review (or even the conclusion) -- AA/AF doesn't work in a number of other games, and when it does it generally causes performance to drop into the useless category.
That would be because SLI mode doesn't work? What sort of idiot would buy a $99 card for SLI work?
They state, clearly, that SLI isn't common at this price point, but that's irrelevant. This is S3's own implementation of it and it doesn't work worth a damn. It's a selling point on their card, so it should work.
It looks like S3 is trying something interesting, throw high speed but dumb hardware at the problem of 3D instead of trying to put more compute power than a P4 on a board
What on earth is that statement based on? They appear to have as much hardware as the competition. In fact, more than the competition does in the same price range. And they appear to have similar hardware algorithms (fast Z-clear, occlusion culling, etc.) as the competition. Whoever modded you up not didn't read the article, they don't understand graphics hardware in the slightest.
I know I'd certainly switch from ATI Radeon 9250 (most current 3D with Open drivers) to this new S3 tech if it had an open driver.
Better hope that 9250 doesn't die then, because that's not happening anytime soon. Go read one of my other posts in this article if you'd care to know why.
Why is this modded insightful? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No what we need (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your idea is that the end desire is not to have more closed proprietary crap. The goal is to have everything be open. Everything. As you may have noticed, lately there have even been open hardware platforms, they're not the latest and greatest but it is possible for the highly motivated and funded individual to use open cores and open source (though "sores" rhymes better) and build a 100% open computer. It'd take a lot of hardware design and software port work, but the basic elements are there. This represents a dramatic shift from the way things have traditionally been, and it can be the beginning of something beautiful, if we don't fall on our ass and stop demanding what we actually want.
People in general are willing to settle for less than what they want, and as a result, they get it. If we continue to demand what we actually desire, eventually someone will step up to the plate and sell it to us.
Re:No what we need (Score:1, Insightful)
There are minuses as well as pluses to this idea. Linux has been able to make big improvements to the way it does things, partly because it hasn't had to be backward compatible with old interfaces. And right now, the ever-changing interfaces are a strong incentive to get code into the mainline kernel. I for one like having drivers in the mainline kernel.
If stable APIs for kernel modeules get cast in stone, hardware guys might just write a driver and ignore it. Eventually the API will need modification, and they'd be all "we already wrote a driver, your problem if your'e breaking the driver."
No solution is perfect.
Re:Good (Score:1, Insightful)