Graphics Drivers: Intel and nVidia *UPDATED*
Mar 25, 2006 19:43 UTC, by Kian Duffy, Senior Journalist
From the graphically-advancing department...

In a bit of a triple-whammy, two (and a half) driver pieces of driver news have fallen within a few days of each other, covering the two manufacturers with some of the highest market shares on the desktop - Intel and nVidia. 
 
In fairly momentous news, a basic Intel Extreme II driver for Haiku has been checked in by Axel. Currently supporting only the i865G chipset, and only mode-changing support, the driver is still more support for this card than BeOS currently had for the card - the predecessor to which was the bane of my life under BeOS on my Sony Vaio [/offtopic]. Despite the initial log message, a later checkin confirmed that the driver does in fact work on R5. Intel Extreme-based cards are found in over half of all new laptop shipments, including the new Apple x86 systems, many IBM and Dell systems, and indeed most mid-range laptops. Low-end desktops also use the card-range frequently.
 
And in the one-and-half pieces of news, a new release of the nVidia driver, bringing the version to 0.74, has come out. The huge changelist since the last BeBits release covers the ability to set overclock settings (at the card owners own, quite serious, risk), improved coldstart (required for cards in use as a second, or higher, video adapter), and improved rendering speed for use by the 3D addon, which was also updated, and is now compatible with the current driver, has returned to using MESA 3.4.1, and is now as fast or possibly faster than the MESA 3.2 Alpha 3.5. A number of general rendering fixes make Quake II render perfectly on the hardware accelerated driver, as well as speed-ups for some specific circumstances which could cause slow-downs.
 
UPDATE
 
I've just been informed by Bernd on BeShare of an announcement relating to the Intel graphics drivers on Haiku's site. This announcement states that yellowTAB have been working on an Intel Extreme 2 driver themselves, and that to prevent duplication of effort, the driver is to be donated to Haiku and worked on in the Haiku source tree. Their driver is not encumbered by any NDAs, which other ones are, preventing their ability to be donated in such a way.