S3 Virge graphics card recognised, but driver is not used

[BenoitRen]

According to the syslog, my S3 Virge graphics card is recognised, and the driver is loaded. However, graphically Haiku is sluggish. It was suggested to look into /dev/graphics. Nothing is in there, strangely enough. So it would appear that VESA is being used regardless.

I'm attaching my syslog. It seems to contain info from both times I booted into Haiku, but I'm not going to try to split it up for fear of losing information.

[BenoitRen]

I was looking with Tracker, when apparently I should have used ls through the Terminal. Both VESA and the S3 drivers are listed there, so they are in use. Weird that Haiku is still sluggish graphically.

[umccullough]

First, a card of that era isn't going to be super-fast ;) And I believe Haiku's app_server double-buffers so it will still use a fair amount of CPU.

I do see that the s3 driver loaded, and found your card - strange that it didn't stay loaded.

When running ls /dev/graphics, you should see at least "vesa" there (it always loads, even if the card is supported by a driver) - if you also see another node there, then a native drive may also have loaded. If you see a node with a bunch of random looking numbers, those are likely the vendor/deviceid of the card detected by a driver.

The best way to find out what native drivers are loaded and being used by the app_server is usually this:

listimage | grep accel

Which will locate and display any binaries loaded with accel in their name (currently all Haiku provided accelerants are called <driver>.accelerant)

[axeld]

It might also be slow because Stephan disabled the use of the acceleration engine, as with faster memory busses, this actually slows down the graphics instead.

So if your card is actually in use, we might want to rethink that change again; in the "old age", acceleration was indeed needed for a good performance.

[gerald.zajac]

This bug report should be closed. Using Haiku alpha 3, I tested the S3 video driver with a video card with an S3 Virge GX2 chip (device ID: 8A10) which is the same chip that the author of this bug report used (see the syslog). I did not find any problems with the video chip. It did not appear slow, and performed at the speed of other video cards of that vintage. The S3 driver did not unload, and whenever I switched video modes, the S3 driver was the driver that changed the mode; not the Vesa driver. Thus, this bug report should be closed.

[umccullough]

Closing per Gerald.

Since there was no specific "fix" involved, I'll mark it as "invalid" at this point.

Thanks!

[nielx]

Remove milestone for tickets with status = closed and resolution != fixed