s3 savage, Ubuntu, (anyone got this to work with VS?)

[starbright]

I just downloaded Vega Strike but it turns out that Ubuntu doesn't have a direct rendering driver for my graphics card. The Googling I've done suggests that the S3 savage is just a rubbish card and will never be able to handle Vega Strike, but I wanted to ask if anyone has gotten Vega Strike to work on a card like mine?

You never know.

[chuck_starchaser]

You can probably find NVidia 6600gt videocars for $10, or in garbage dumps; and those old cards
support pixel shader 3 (ps3.0), which would allow you to set the shader to Nicest. 6600gt would
be very slow, though; I would recommend 8800gts, if you can find $50 somewhere. That's what
I have, and I paid $500 for it, seems like yesterday.
But yeah, S3 Savage WAS garbage in its hey-day; it's garbage^666 now.

[klauss]

You can probably find NVidia 6600gt videocars for $10, or in garbage dumps;

I just checked price comparison sites. They're actually closer to 50 USD.

But yeah, S3 Savage WAS garbage in its hey-day; it's garbage^666 now.

I think my old (very dead) celeron (64MB ram) laptop had one of those. So you can imagine just how old it is.
I always thought the laptop had NO 3D acceleration, I was shocked to learn that the S3 had some acceleration - just very, very bad.

Anyway, it should run with no shaders, low res texture, low LOD on meshes (although only a handful meshes have LODs) - thing is, those settings are far from properly calibrated nowadays, and I don't expect them ever to be calibrated for the S3. You'll have to tweak vegastrike.config by hand, and heavily, with your fingers crossed.

And it won't be pretty OR fast.

[chuck_starchaser]

NewEgg doesn't even have any 6600 or 6800 gpu based cards; but they have 8400-based cards for $20; so I don't think I'm too far off with my $10 estimation for 6600 series price.

[klauss]

This doesn't agree

That's a bit (a lot) steep though, I can confirm local prices in the $200 range (pesos ~ 50USD).

Of course here things are more expensive, there are lots of taxes and import costs, but I don't believe the difference would be 5-fold. Rather, I'd expect a 30USD price tag in the USA.

Canada I really don't know - besides canadian dollars are different from US dollars... so I'm lost

Anyway, you're right, they're damn hard to find. I remember a few months ago I "requisitioned" one for my computer here at work, since the intel garbage it came with didn't get along with linux very well, and instead they got me an 8800 (yep...), because they couldn't find anything less than that.

[chuck_starchaser]

Canadian dollar and US dollar are hovering around parity right now; so basically the same thing.
That Pricewatch price is completely ridiculous. I think all it means is that nobody sells them
anymore, but some guy somewhere has one and thinks of it as a collectors' item, and that happens
to be the lowest price that Pricewatch automatically found. Essentially, 6600's and 6800's are
already worthless. $0 (zero). Nobody sells them. Nobody buys them. And if you really want one,
what you're paying for is not the hardware, but someone's time and breathing discomfort for
walking over heaps of trash with a metal detector.

[klauss]

Canadian dollar and US dollar are hovering around parity right now; so basically the same thing.
That Pricewatch price is completely ridiculous. I think all it means is that nobody sells them
anymore, but some guy somewhere has one and thinks of it as a collectors' item, and that happens
to be the lowest price that Pricewatch automatically found. Essentially, 6600's and 6800's are
already worthless. $0 (zero). Nobody sells them. Nobody buys them. And if you really want one,
what you're paying for is not the hardware, but someone's time and breathing discomfort for
walking over heaps of trash with a metal detector.

They're not worthless, they're very good designs. But true, if you do find one, you'll be paying a lot more per flop than if you get an 8800 or, better yet, a GF9 (which has better performance-price ratios).

In windows, though, I'd always recommend ATI - they're faster, cheaper, a little less high-tech feature-wise, but more than capable for any kind of gaming. The only problem is that they don't get along with linux - poor drivers and that kind of thing - but they're very good cards just as well.

@starbright: In short: if you have a laptop, you're stuck with the S3. But if you can switch (ie: you have an old desktop with an integrated S3) - do switch, your whole system will be relieved, your old desktop will feel faster - it will BE faster, since with a real GPU it won't have to do graphics work - and you'll be happier.

[chuck_starchaser]

Ah, no; I didn't mean to knock down the real value of 6600's; I loved mine, and they are still good value.
What I meant is that the market basically considers them worthless. In fact, the market doesn't even
consider them at all; it forgot them, already.
Probably they only exist in the second-hand market, like you can probably get them on EBay or
in CraigsList, pawnshops, garage sales...
But for people who know, they certainly have intrinsic value; but most people don't know, so they just
don't have much of a $ value.

[starbright]

@starbright: In short: if you have a laptop, you're stuck with the S3. But if you can switch (ie: you have an old desktop with an integrated S3) - do switch, your whole system will be relieved, your old desktop will feel faster - it will BE faster, since with a real GPU it won't have to do graphics work - and you'll be happier.

OK, That's pretty much what I figured. I'll probably start saving for a whole new lappy - now I've got a good excuse.

Edit:--

I got it working. You can tell Ubuntu to use software rendering only and at the smallest size, windowed with sound turned off and no other apps running... it works!!! Yay!!!

Here's the code.

#!/bin/bash
# vstrike workaround launcher
cd vegastrike-0.5.0/
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 vegastrike

Copy and paste it into gedit, save with any name you like, make a launcher, set properties to executable and Bob's your uncle.