[MPlayer-dev-eng] VIDIX driver for S3 Savage chipsets

[Felix Buenemann]

On Monday 15 April 2002 21:17, William R Sowerbutts wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm using a Shuttle FV25 motherboard as the base for a DVD/DVB-t playback
> box. The FV25 uses the VIA ProSavage PM133 Northbridge, which features an
> integrated S3 Savage Twister graphics engine (it uses 8Mb--32Mb of the
> system DRAM for the framebuffer)
>
> I am using a 1GHz Pentium III in this system with PC133 SDRAM. I see about
> 80% CPU load decoding video at 1024x768 in 16 bit colour under X11 with
> Xvideo output (using the savage 1.23t XFree86 4.1 driver).
>
>
> Problem #1: Ideally I'd like to run in 32 bit colour, but this just
> overwhelms the machine (100% CPU load, mplayer complains about the machine
> being too slow...) -- I guess my prejudice against integrated graphics
> chipsets for being slow was well placed ;)
try attached driver, it has asm optimizations by me and gives me 42% speedup 
decoding dvd on PIII 850 w/Savage MX 8MB, compared to the driver that comes 
with XFree 4.2.0.
>
> Problem #2: I see a lot of tearing artefacts (even with a 25fps DVD and my
>   monitor refresh at 75 or 100Hz) -- I assume that this is due to a lack of
>   vertical refresh synchronisation in the driver.
I hacked vsync support into my modified driver, but it slowed down decoding by 
stalling the blitting, so my current driver is compiled w/o vsync. However 
triple-buffering can help around that.
I'll attach my patch against 1.23t so you can look at the code.

>
> From perusing the CVS source, I presume that #2 and (hopefully) #1 could be
> solved (or at least improved?) by writing a Vidix driver for the S3 Savage
> chipset my hardware uses.
>
> Is anyone working on this already? Is anyone interested in helping out if I
> decide to write one? Does anyone have any / know where to find any docs on
> the S3 Streams (S3 BES) hardware?
I'd like to support you as much as time allows me.
Best source for docs should be Tim Robert's savage driver for xfree 4. He has 
the tech-docs under an non-disclosure agreement afaik, but you could try 
getting the docs from s3 under such agreement yourself.

>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Will
>

-- 
Best Regards,
        Atmos
____________________________________________
- MPlayer Developer - http://mplayerhq.hu/ -
____________________________________________
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