[GRLUG] NVidia or ATI

[Tim Schmidt]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 12:05 AM, Greg Folkert <greg at gregfolkert.net> wrote:
> Hey that's MY schtict!

Well...  as a founding member of the Open Graphics Project, and
Director of the (admittedly not very active) Open Hardware Foundation,
I think I can lay a little claim...  ;)

> I was going to suggest Intel stuff, but wasn't sure if they came through
> on the "cards".

They're certainly not common in stores, but easy enough to find on the internet.

> And yes, Everything I buy now is getting the Intel Video... barring one
> I am getting with HDMI output.

Intel recently pushed some patches toward mainline that support HDMI
audio using recent Intel integrated graphics.  The video portion of
HDMI was already supported.  There are a fair number of motherboards
now coming with HDMI instead of DVI built right in - since the two are
compatible on the electrical and protocol levels, only a simple
pass-through style adapter is required to convert between them.  So,
for all intents and purposes, an HDMI output can be counted as a DVI
output as well.

With all that said, I haven't seen a setup yet that yields working
HDMI audio on _any_ graphics card on Linux without either compiling
some software from source or installing a proprietary driver.  Intel
and ATI / AMD are both _very_ close though.  Likely the next round of
distributions will have out-of-the-box support for both.

Via is a bit up in the air at the moment.  They're certainly making
most of the right noises, and hiring Harold Welte is a very good sign,
but the proof will be in the pudding, so to speak.

XGI (formerly the graphics division of SiS and Trident) at one point
released some incomplete and somewhat messy source, but quickly
abandoned it, and hasn't released any documentation to speak of.
Needless to say, support is spotty at best.

S3 is still making discrete graphics chipsets, and boards hosting
them, but appear to be available only online - and rarely then.  No
docs or drivers that I know of.

There are some other niche players in the embedded space...  PowerVR
(probably the most popular product in use with hardware from these
folks are TI's OMAP series of SoCs used in the BeagleBoard and Nokia's
Linux-based web tablets) has binary Linux drivers, but no docs or FOSS
drivers.  The OpenMoko GTA02 phone uses a chip called the "glammo"
made by Smedia - very full featured, includes things like a full ARM
core and SD card controller, but docs only available to OpenMoko
developers under NDA.  There are many other lesser players - most of
which with little support or documentation.  Relatively 'dumb' 2D
framebuffers are still ubiquitous in the embedded space - most with
open support.

The situation is getting drastically better, and with the support of
folks buying computers and gadgets (i.e. buying computers and gadgets
that have open docs and drivers), will only get better.

--tim