S3 Announces New GPU, Magical Linux Driver
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 20:20.
In addition to VIA announcing a register documentation drop and driver partnership, S3 Graphics, which is a VIA Technologies joint venture company, has announced a new graphics card. Earlier this year S3 announced the Chrome 440 GTX, but today's press release christens the Chrome 500 series. The Chrome 500 series is compatible with OpenGL 3.0 (and Microsoft DirectX 10.1) and is quite an affordable graphics card.
The first discrete graphics card in the S3 Chrome 500 series is the Chrome 530 GT and is a PCI Express 2.0 part with OpenGL 2.1/3.0 support. This graphics card is set to retail for less than $50 USD.
S3 video card needs migration path defined ? accelerator ?
Video cards change ascii codes to pixel displays. Many Video protocols are there to handle video codes to pixels.
Many years ago, video cards started to use accelerators, which is just multi cored video processors of 64 bit cpus. But that is also the reason that 64 bit cpus are inefficient to handle 8 bit ascii codes one at a time.
So, S3 will have performance advantage if it includes cells of FPU to accelerate the monitor screen writing by 1/4 or 1/8 segmented files. Most video cards subdivide into 6 parts for each screen writing.
If Via is lucky, and their engineers start to use multiple 8 bit FPU; S3 can run around all the 64 bit video processors with ease.
Footnote:
Linux has good xvesa drivers for S3 video cards by driver components. Xorg also has limited functions of xvesa driver components, but need to config better for xvesa. Beyond drivers, some protocols are exclusive for Microsoft media player, so Linux media players may not need to comply.