“XGI Technology is still in business, but what has happened to them? We once saw hope in them for providing discrete graphics processors to take on the NVIDIA and ATI duopoly, but they have since discontinued their Volari 8 series. While they’re no longer producing these desktop chips, they remain an active player in the server and embedded graphics industry – accompanied by their OSS driver.”
They almost had me there to buy a volari 8600xt when avaiable.(maybe lucky for me that it never surfaced) i really loved the older xabre600 chip that they produced for SiS before the change of name to XGI. And their path for an opensource driver seemed very possible.
Well see if they get back on the desktop later. There has been rumors that VIA wants this company too. (It seems VIA collects insolvent graphicsmanufacurers such as S3, Trident and other smaller ones.)And maybe its true since via now needs better integrated graphics to be able to compete with AMD, nvidia and intel.
I think I haven’t heared and thought about them for over a year. It was only in the weekend I got remainded because I’ve come across a driver update notice. I had such great hopes in the Parhelia after being a Mystique and then G400 user. Do they have OEMs at all?
Their big thing is still medical imaging. Have you seen some of their greyscale graphics cards? They can do ungodly resolutions and so many heads it’s sick. I still do enjoy my G400s & G450s, though.
I know they do other stuff as well, or else they’d be dead like a dodo right now. I was thinking desktop graphics of course. I think we’ll never see a 3D chip from them again – it’s just too costly for a private little company to get into the insane product-cycle race with Ati + NV.
I loved my Matrox cards (I’ve owned a Millennium 2, G200 and Marvel G400 and Millennium G400). I think they had the least buggy of all the drivers for windows, and the drivers were mostly open source for Linux (with the exception of their dual-head bits).
It does suck that Matrox left the 3D graphics arena. That just left the two giants to do battle. The Parhelia had some features that still haven’t been utilized in newer graphics cards. For example, the fragment anti-aliasing (which was really cool, when it worked. It was still rather buggy on the original Parhelia), Glyph Text for font anti-aliasing (looked a lot better than Clear-type to me), and the infamous Triple-Head display. This simply ROCKED! Playing Neverwinter Nights across three screens was the coolest thing ever. Not to mention being able to see in your peripheral vision in Unreal Tournament games!
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/platforms/xgi
http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/program/xgi
/rasmus
If you like 3 screens for gaming, you can do it without Matrox cards. Buy one of their TripleHead2Go devices that let you add 2 extra monitors from one video port. This means you can use whatever card you like for driving 3 monitors.
http://www.surroundgaming.com
There is a list of games that work well with 3 monitors in that site.
worth a look
Free Software Download
http://www.populardownload.net/