I have a Compaq Armada 100S, which has a Trident Cyberblade i7 graphics chipset in it.
I have been configuring X.org in it, and with the Trident driver, it looks really bad. The resolution
is very rough, fonts look bad, etc. The OS is FreeBSD, and FreeBSD lets you do all the configuring yourself.

When I select the generic vesa driver, it looks great. Fonts look good. Resolution looks good.
Colours look good. Etc.

Has anyone had similar experiences? I had sort of expected the chipset's own driver to look and
perform the best, but it so happens the generic vesa driver does the trick.

Ekkume.

You probably need to tweak the settings in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for your driver.

Maybe the defaults for your specific driver are low resolution settings.

Running generic vesa driver unless absolutely required will take up CPU usage and will not be really efficient.

I have been tweaking, and tweaking and tweaking. You have to tweak it with FreeBSD. Using Xorgs automatic configuration caused a black screen, which I could not get rid of even with rebooting. Only powerdown got rid of it. Fortunately, I was able to "blindly" halt the system and then power it down. xorgcfg -textmode was how I was able to finally configure it, and also by hand.

(Debian seems to put the vesa driver as a default, since it "just works". I see my other same-era IBM laptop has the generic vesa driver, and I haven't tweaked it. It has Debian Sid.) The Trident driver simply does not work well in X.org. There were no settings that looked good. 800x600 res using the Trident driver looked like VGA whereas it looked sharp with the vesa driver. Maybe it is one of those where the chipset's manufacturer has proprietary, closed source drivers that they only give to Microsoft. Well, I am not going to use this old PC for games, so I am happy now. I am putting together a new PC and expect my Nvidia Geforce FX card will work correctly with the Xorg drivers, dri, etc. by now.

Ekkume