Why open source rocks – a new SM750 (Silicon Motion GPU) HDMI Driver
18 points by SillyUsername 2 hours ago | 6 comments
userbinator 14 minutes ago
A GPU with HDMI and 16MB of VRAM is a very strange combination.
replySillyUsername 8 minutes ago
I agree but these things are only about $25 USD.
Arguably an older Nvidia GPU is a better investment at this price if you just want basic desktop use. Unfortunately if I did that, the old Nvidia drivers wouldn't support my newer Nvidia Blackwell hardware.
replyrealusername 47 minutes ago
Will you upstream it?
replySillyUsername 11 minutes ago
Possibly, but in order to be safe for everyone, reviewers may want me to remove features that allow the driver to achieve the non-standard performance. There's a lot of hoops to jump through :)
reply
I created it because I wanted my Nvidia GPUs to be compute only, and needed a cheap and small display GPU to run X11. I bought this GPU on AliExpress, after learning it had Linux support. It does, but kernel 5.x series and the sm750 driver in modern Linux only supports the older VGA/DVI variants.
Rather than send it back or throw it away, I decided to vibe code a new driver with new features, to make it usable for day to day desktop use. I've a little bit of a background in low level graphics so also added a cool little magic ordered dither (a pretty good one I think!) I devised myself, called "bbdither", and a few hacks to get 2560x1080 at 75hz on a device only officially documented as capable of up to 1920x1200 at 60hz, and PCI-E 1x speed.
Screenshots here: https://github.com/KodeMunkie/sm750hdmifb#screenshots
If you try it out, be careful - read the project disclaimer :)
*Vibe coded, as mentioned in Hackernews comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415282