Video driver FAQ

Information about the individual video drivers can be found on the VideoDrivers page. This page is there to provide information that doesn't quite fit into a single driver.

I have an S3 graphics card, which driver should I use ?

There are three drivers for S3 graphics chipsets:

• The S3 driver, which supports some of the Trio64 and older chipsets (use: Driver "s3", for details check s3),
• the S3 Virge driver which supports the S3 Virge and S3 Trio3D chipsets (use: Driver "s3virge", for details check s3virge),
• the Savage driver which supports most of the S3 Savage chipsets (use: Driver "savage", for details check savage).

Please NOTE: The S3 driver in XFree86 3.x supports a lot more of the old S3 chips. Only support for a few of them has been ported to X.Org R6.7. Currently no-one is working on porting further chipsets. We are still looking for someone to help porting more S3 chips.

I have a CirrusLogic chipset, which driver should I use ?

There is one “wrapper” module which will automatically detect the type of hardware and load the correct sub module. We support both flavors of Cirrus Logic chipsets, the 'Laguna' and the 'Alpine' chipsets. (use: Driver "cirrus", for details check cirrus)

Please NOTE: X.Org 6.7 doesn't support some of the old ISA Cirrus chips XFree86 3.x used to support.

I have an ATI graphics card, which driver should I use ?

The GATOS project create enhanced (fast) drivers for the ATI chipsets, which also include TV in/out support for most ATI cards that have this feature. While the main target of these drivers is still XFree86, they are still compatible with the X.org server. The GATOS project does not yet redistribute X.org compatible binaries, but compiling against the X.org source tree will work. The GATOS TV-in code has been incorporated into XOrg, but its TV-out code is still only available in the GATOS drivers.

For r200 cards on down, the open source ati drivers will provide excellent 3d acceleration. for r300 and up, the only fully functioning option is ATI's proprietary fglrx drivers in X11R6.8 and below. In X11R6.9 and X11R7.0, DRI will work on r300 and up.

I have an XGI card, which driver should I use?

The XGI XP5 laptop chip and Volari V3 card are based on a Trident core. However, they are not yet supported in the trident driver, so you will have to use vesa for now.

All other XGI chips (Volari V3XT, V5, and V8) are supported by the sis driver in Xorg 6.9 and later.

I have a Matrox card, which driver should I use?

X.Org ships with the mga driver which supports the Matrox G-series cards (G550 and below). Alternatively, Matrox offers X.org-compatible Linux drivers on their driver download page, for both the G-series and P-series cards.