I checked their homepage some hours ago and there it said that all savage4 had DRI. If I didn't read it all wrong, that is...

Did they have a driver for Linux, then?

It looks like no one else has had any luck with Savage

Google hits

Abstracts from the homepage http://www.probo.com/timr/savage40.html

"VIA/S3 has release an updated version of THEIR Savage driver. It forked off of my source base about 3 years ago, so there are significant differences, but it looks like they have addressed a number of issues. This includes motion compensation support for MPEG playback (XvMC), and the long-awaited DRI driver for 3D OpenGL code. The DRI driver is only for the ProSavage and Twister chips, so it won't help Savage/IX or SuperSavage users. If you want to download the source and build it, try http://www.linux.org.uk/~alan/S3.zip. It was built for XFree86 4.2.0; the DRI code, in particular, will need a lot of work for XFree86 4.3.0. However, this driver has been submitted to XFree86, so with any luck it will be a standard part of XFree86 4.4. "



But hang on....
At the end of the page (Known Issues) it says:

"DRI/OpenGL/Mesa support.


There is currently no DRI driver for the Savages for XFree86 4.x, which means that OpenGL applications are entirely simulated in software. There was work going on at one time to add this support, by the same fellow who did the UtahGLX driver for XFree86 3.3.6, but his e-mail address no longer responds."

So what do make of this. I think it not supported, but it works in Windows, at least I can choose Hardware acceleration there, but if it really works or not must be unspoken of.

Here is the Linux driver: S3.zip

See this mailing list post

NIce to have a driver, looks promising... but how do you install it into Mandrake. All instructions are for RedHat. I have been trying for nearly 5 hours now and I would like some expert advice now.

Please, unzip the file and have a look at "Linux installation guide---Src.doc" and tell me how it shold be for a Mandrake user like me.

For myself I'm going to bed it is 10 to 5am so it's time to get some sleep.

Looking briefly at the instructions, once you get past the RedHat update stuff (which you can skip) the installation instructions starting on page 3 look pretty generic. I think you just extract the .gz file from your /usr/src directory, where it will create a set of sub-directories. The .doc file refers to a "S3 driver" directory, but the zip file looks as though it is going to unpack into a "LinuxDriver" directory. At any rate, once you extract everything, start with the instructions on page 3 where it says:

cd "S3 driver" (which like I said might actually be "LinuxDriver")
./savage_install /root/xc

and then just follow the rest of the instructions. But if I understand what you were saying about 3 posts above, none of this is going to matter because there is no DRI support for the S3 chipset in the current XFree86 versions.