Andrew Bloo from SciTech Software sent us in a clarification to our yesterday’s story: “The SciTech SNAP drivers are not actually XFree86 specific at all, but rather the XFree86 driver is just a small module that interfaces to SciTech SNAP. Once SciTech SNAP is installed on the system, developers can actually code directly
to the SciTech SNAP API’s via the SDK, and bypass X entirely.Another thing worth noting is that the SciTech SNAP drivers can be used to provide device support for any other graphics API on linux, such as Qt/Embedded, SDL, DirectFB, SVGALib or GGI (as well as the SciTech MGL of course).”
SciTech also supports DOS, Windows, QNX and OS/2 with their driver suite.
Well i’ll be damned…isnt that cool. Good Job SciTech!
Now start porting to different architectures (please)! eheh
I must say, that is an impressive and much needed effort! Bravo indeed!
PPC support is currently being developed while other platforms are being evaluated for fit/need. Suggestions?
What I need is a good driver that supports all the features of my video card not some cheesy 2D only driver. Anyone can purchase an old video card that is fully supported by X for less than $50. But I want my new video cards to work with analog video I/O, 2D and 3D acceleration, etc. Either offer me a product for free that doesn’t quite match up to what I’m looking for or sell me exactly what I want. Making accelerated 2D drivers for Linux does not impress me.
XFree86 gets close enough for me and if its only 10% slower than the professional drivers what incentive do I have to switch?
Oh, and I’m sure the banner ads will be back any day now.
Personally, I would love to see a driver that supported 2D drawing properly on my Acer laptop. Even under Windows its Trident CyberBlade graphics card creates problem. I want smooth window dragging! I want good 2D performance! If Scitech can give me this, where do I send the money?
Some GF4 BeOS drivers would be krad ^___^
Dude. Drivers can’t make up for crappy hardware
There are some chipsets that are just plain broken, and anything with the Trident brand made in the last half-decade falls into that catagory.
PPC port is a start, unfortunately that’s not what i run eheh. Good accelerated drivers for DEC Alphas are hard to come by. So feel free to port to that.
Actually although there is little demand for the DEC Alpha port, we actually started on that prior to the PPC port to get started before we recieved PPC hardware. Hence most of the work is already done, and once the PPC version is up and running I expect we will get the Alpha version going to. Most of the porting issues are the same for both platforms (and we have Alpha machines we can develop and test on which is nice).
Feel free to sign up for the SciTech SNAP mailing list for Linux related announcements – including newly added HW.
http://list.scitechsoft.com/mailman/listinfo/announce.snap.linux
I have a savage4 (a ProSavageDDR K4M266 to be specific) in my laptop. It has got 2D acceleration under X, so I can’t see myself paying for a small speed bump (after all, I’m a poor college student). However, I’d pay up to $30 dollars for accelerated 3D. I dunno if that’s a feasible market for SciTech. I wonder if there’s a paying market for closed source accelerated 3D linux drivers?
I would be interested in a driver for my card. I have an ATI Radeon Mobility M6 (compaq 2701us laptop) and I run FreeBSD. How much does the driver set cost?
I have TONS of ideas if the API is fairly easy to learn. I can’t wait to try it out!
I know you are tired of this comment, but I need the 3D.
I’d rather you focus on just a FEW fairly current 3D cards instead of holding them all off so that some ancient card is supported.
I have a house full of Nvidia cards and one Radeon, but I would upgrade for this with 3D support.
One question for SciTech, will it be a per computer license, or a per household license? I have 6 computers (3 kids, a wife, 2 for me), so it could add up…
You can go grab the current SDK source code now and start playing with it (it is dual GPL/proprietry licensed right now, but the SDK will soon be out under the LGPL license instead). It comes with support for VGA and VESA drivers in the SDK, but you will need to wait for the public beta of SNAP to use the accelerated drivers.
As for 3D, this is high on our priority list. As you mentioned, the plan is to focus on a few current cards initially before we consider supporting the older hardware.
Usually the license is per computer I believe. We haven’t considered a ‘family’ license pack, but that is something we should consider now that you have brought it up.
“As for 3D, this is high on our priority list.”, does this mean that 3D is “under development” or “to be developed”, could you clarify on this a bit more?, Alot of us old OS/2 users would LOVE 3D accel as that means Windows games should be able to become a possibility on our platform of choice.
will you sell a certain number of snap drivers to driver developers who can then sell the entire package or are you going to sell the snap driver seperatly and then leave it to the customer to get a driver from some a company or group that developes the driver he/she needs?
If you can get better 2d than NVidia’s and still allow NVidia’s 3d code to work, or write your own, then I’d probably be sold on it, mainly because I think you’d do better with the 2d drivers, I know scitechsoft’s VBE stuff in DOS rocked. NVidia’s 3d code is pretty good, but their 2d code lately hasn’t been as great
Yea, I agree, Scitech certainly did good VBE stuff.. actually, SNAP could be THE product to revolutionize graphics if it incorporates 3D, even if the API is their own, I’m sure it could easily become THE API of choice since it’s 2d, 3D AND cross platform, not even OpenGL has that =)
Scitech, best of luck
One would presume they would be looking at Mesa integration for their 3D API. Similar to how the Voodoo cards work under Linux without the need for XFree86.
Would this be hard to do?
The Lone OS’er wrote:
> “As for 3D, this is high on our priority list.”, does this
> mean that 3D is “under development” or “to be developed”,
> could you clarify on this a bit more?,
3D is under development and has been for some time, it is just that other projects keep cropping up that get in the way. Most of the internal hardware API has been designed and a lot of the core functionality has already been implemented (such as the necessary offscreen buffer and resouce management code etc). There is a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done for 3D, and we have been working on that for quite some time now.
Torgeir asked:
“DirectFB driver interface module? Would this be hard to do?”
No actually, it would be quite easy to do as would a driver interface module for SDL and GGI. We don’t have the time to work on this right now, but using the existing SDK it should be quite easy to get this working (especially now with the shared library version of libpm.so that ships with SNAP).
Was that 2 computers or two wives for you;) Our policy has been based on a per seat (kid, wife…) license – but this is an intereting question – I will come back to you on this