Intel Pulls In ShadowFB Support For KMS

[wirrbeltier]

[...]

It's weird because the argument is often made that having open source means it's easier to keep old hardware around and supported.

My guess would be that we will see similar reduced-feature-legacy strategies more often in the future. As graphical drivers get even more complex, and the graphical stack becomes an even faster moving target, at some point it is too much work to keep up old driver architectures.
Then you have to either "kill it with fire" and tell people to switch to VESA, or make this sort of minimum-feature, minimum-maintenance-driver (that can then be supported for a long time, possibly).

Perhaps this is the strength and weakness of the OS model: stuff can be supported indefinitely, if only there is the will to do so. The constraining factors are developer time, and the fast evolution of the rest of the software platform.

[pingufunkybeat]

3D performance was shit when it's new, was shit when we had decent drivers, was shit regardless of what OS your using, and will always be shit from now and until the end of eternity. There is nothing Intel can do about it now: that boat had sailed over 10 years ago.

Nowadays, I play Open Arena (Q3A) on my HD 4550 using OSS radeon drivers and all these new technologies.

I was playing Quake 3 Arena 10 years ago with the intel i810 driver on an integrated intel chipset.

I wouldn't call that "shit" performance. It was damn impressive for its time.