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Hardware

Updated XFree86-3D FAQ 48

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wouldn't-3d-be-neat dept.
anonymous porcupine writes "From the XFree86-3D I just got word of an updated version of the FAQ which details the current state of hardware accelerated 3D rendering in Linux. Gives a bit of history, an update regarding the state of affairs, and information on where to find out more about the current projects. "
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Updated XFree86-3D FAQ More

Updated XFree86-3D FAQ

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  • 2 monitors? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder, is it possible to hook up an extra monitor to voodoo card (rather than use a silly pass-through cable) and use 2 monitors simultaneously?
  • The problem for a lot of people who care about 3D rendering is that current speeds on Linux (and Intel hardware in general) just aren't up to snuff. Displaying complex molecules and trying to rotate them just doesn't do what you need.

    More and more "serious" applications depend on 3D rendering at high speeds. We need to know how close hardware acceleration is to being a reality on Linux so we can plan on whether or not to use it as platform either for development or deployment of product.

    But I get paid to write closed-source software so my views may be different from yours.
  • Probably because it is an important question, one that many lurkers may be asking themselves. Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers. In this case, promoting the question made whatever answers it gathers more easily accessible.
  • XFree version 3 does not. It's on the todo list for XFree version 4.

    If you are careful, I hear you can run two copies of XFree version 3 side-by-side for two different screens. I also hear you can run text consoles on one monitor while the other runs X.
  • Posted by matsutsu:

    Ive been searching on the internet for months on S3Trio3D-HOWTO but no luck. I dont care if it could not do 3D acceleration, as of the moment, i just want my S3 Trio3D to work even only at 256 colors. Currently, my PC can only do 16 colors using VGA16 XFree driver at 640x480. Had anyone here successfully installed the right driver for it? Thanks in advance.

    cheerio :)
    matsutsu
  • Posted by Bocharn:

    If I can run my Unreal under wine with full 3dfx support, I'll finally stop using Windows.
    (I hope the Internet multiplayer is also supported
    under wine)
  • Posted by OGL:

    I'm sorry if I read that wrong, but it looks to me like that document claims the /dev/3dfx driver is in the 2.2 Linux kernel. If so, where is it? I'd love to use it since the MTRR support will supposedly give you better performance.

    -W.W.
  • Posted by OGL:

    XFree doesn't support multi-head. Please read their documentation before posting questions to /.

    -W.W.
  • Posted by OGL:

    I would, but there are no newsreaders worth using for Linux. Why do the XFree86 people seem to think it's in there, and why won't there ever be a 3dfx module for 2.2.x? Don't 2.2 users deserve better performance as well?

    -W.W.
  • Posted by matsutsu:

    Are you using S3 Trio3D also? I've tried that before but I get an error "execve failed for /etc/X11/X, errno 13" when I "startx". But during the startup of my machine, I can see the cute little penguin icon (using VGA=773 i think, 256 colors at 1024x768). I followed the instructions and downloaded the binary file of XF68FB_Dev. I dont know what went wrong.


    thanks in advance,
    matsutsu
  • I was thinking about that the other day... I'm doing 3D medical imaging, and a lot of the hardware available today to render complicated medical stuff is there and low in price thanks to the game industry...
    Silicon graphics were the way to go 10 years ago if you wanted to render MRI/CT data, but now, you can get the same kind of results with a PC and a good graphics card... I'm using IDL [rsinc.com] to prototype my algorithms, and I wish it were as fast on Linux as it is in windows, rendering wise, or computation wise (is that because visual C++ gives better code than gcc? is it because mesa is slower than the windoze implementation of opengl? dunno...) but ultimately, my stuff is gonna be coded using GTK (sorry, I'm a C person ;) and any 3D acceleration I can get my hands on... basically, medimaging is nothing more than a boring 3D game ;)

    Anyway, my point is... with popular 3D games containing as many polygons as Quake, the hardware needed to render scenes at a good frame rate goes down in price because of this popularity, and benefits many other field of which... the medical imaging industry :-)

    Way to go folks!!!!

    ---

  • Yes. (Score:1)

    by sterwill ( 972 )
    Or, if you have a decent Voodoo card (like the ones Canopus Corp. _used_ to make), hook a TV to the S-Video or Composite output.
  • We need to know how close hardware acceleration is to being a reality on Linux
    so we can plan on whether or not to use it as platform either for development or
    deployment of product.

    It's quite close: Xi Graphics is doing hardware accelerated 3D in X-Windows with Evans & Sutherland gfx cards.

    Regards, Jochen

  • Okay, I was working the GDC (Game Developers Conference) last week, and figured it would be a good time to get a status report on Linux support from various hardware vendors that had booths on the expo floor.

    At the NVidia booth, I talked to one guy who said that they do not want to support Linux, but that they would release the specs under NDA and that supposedly "some people were working on it." He said that the person over there in the Hawaiian shirt could give me more key information. So I trundle over to that guy, and ask him what's up, and he says that a) they have NO intention to do any support for Linux internally, and b) they have NO intention of releasing their specs, even under NDA , because they need to protect their hardware API which is valuable "intellectual property," and other bullshit like that. He also completely refuted the other guy's claim that there were "people" currently working on Linux 3D drivers. He seemed annoyed and really wanted to brush me off, even though I was just politely inquiring.

    Talking with some other random people at the conference, not related to NVidia, THEY said that NVidia couldn't release any specs or anything because of the lawsuits against them. 3DFx is one of the folks with a lawsuit against NVidia, I think. So, if that's the case, why not just say that and I could leave without feeling sort of betrayed?

    I also talked to ATI, with their Advanced Nipple Rendering Engine, and they said that they were seriously considering Linux support, whatever that means. I talked with him a bit, explaining how they didn't have to release the source for their 3D drivers (they were under the impression they had to) and also how if they were to be willing to release the specs under NDA, they could basically get people to do their work writing the drivers for them for free. I left ATI feeling very positive about their possible future linux support, but it might have been just smooth-talking.

    Anyway, that was the extent of the information I gathered, straight from their mouths to you. Of course it's all very non-official, but it's probably more informed than your average press release.
  • I thought XiGraphics has done (is doing) more than mentioned in this FAQ. No?
  • It's not, and it probably won't ever be. If you have a 3dfx card I highly recommend you check out news:3dfx.glide.linux
  • I could see that worknig for something like POSIX certification, But, even if you could get Funding for licensing for something like say, I20(TM) or DVD there's still the little matter of Non-discloser clauses.

    As I understand it, part of some the licensing deal is that you can reveal any aspects of the spec (especially, if there's a competing spec). Hence, you can't distribute the source for your creation under the GPL. Or am I wong?
  • As a developer of an GPL'd OpenGL app for Linux,
    I really appreciate someone taking the effort to
    put this faq together.
    Integration of Hardware Acceleration/3D rendering
    and X is one of Linux's rougher edges. Brian's
    hack to allow Voodoo-based 3d cards to peform
    in-window rendering is neat, but I don't think it
    is a permanent 3D solution for Linux/XFree86.
  • if you think you just need basic Nvidia support, wait till you see TNT 2 SLI boards from metabyte (and maybe others) in the next few months
  • Unreal runs fine under Wine with Glide and software rendering. Multiplayer works well (okay, not with Wine-990314, due to a winsock implementation bug, but previous and later releases will be fine). The only thing that isn't working perfectly is sound. It plays, but not well.
  • tin makes the multiple news server business relatively easy. In my home directory is a file called .newsrc-news.3dfx.com with the line
    3dfx.glide.linux:

    Then in my ~/.tin/newsrctable is the line
    news.3dfx.com .newsrc-news.3dfx.com 3dfx
    Now I start tin with 'tin -g 3dfx', and away we go.
  • It was really really slow for me to grab this so I saved it and threw it on a box I have.



    http://129.21.135.204/mirrore d/XFree86-3D-status.html [129.21.135.204]



    Should be nice and quick. (not that the article is anything really really /.able)

    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.

  • Take a look a this:
    http://www.uno.edu/~adamico/banshee/

    It's about bansee, but the same applies to trio3d as well. I got it working using this page!

    Szo
  • Are you using S3 Trio3D also?

    Yes.

    I've tried that before but I get an error "execve failed for /etc/X11/X, errno 13" when I "startx".

    I didn't encounter this problem. Try starting with xinit 2>&1 >log, and read the log file carefully, maybe it can help. You created the /dev/fb* devices?

    But during the startup of my machine, I can see the cute little penguin icon (using VGA=773 i think, 256 colors at 1024x768).
    Thats good, it means you got the framebuffer working.

    Szo
  • that box with the mirror of the FAQ was TOO
    fast... can i get a shell there?? :-)
  • Um..thats only if you're talking about ray trace rendering. Games are rendered using polygon rendering which is a much lower quality. Of course if you have the card to do it you can alpha dither the hell out of a frame and make it look smoother-Nintendo64 does this quite well-it serves it's purpose. An easy way to do a 3D X is to make it be able to view VRML files as the main screen. You could then have a 3D operating environment. Depending on the graphics card you had you could have some seriously kickass environments. An interface could be set up to allow you to run programs in window or some such. Theres tons of possibilities.
  • Im no ace on this kind of stuff but doesnt the permedia2 chip have som kind of geometry engine?
  • I, too, have a TNT. I seem to be stuck running XF86 for the time being. At least until Metro Extreme 3D [metrolink.com]comes out, (whenever the heck that will be) as I don't think the Metro OpenGL [metrolink.com] will be all that much quicker for VMWare [vmware.com]. :(
    All I want is fast video in Linux. Is that too much to ask? Judging from Nvidia's co-operation with the Linux community: yes.

    --L

  • Why does there have to be a FAQ on this.. 3d rendering is 3d rendering...
  • You wrote:
    As I understand it, part of some the licensing deal is that you can reveal any aspects of the spec (especially, if there's a competing spec). Hence, you can't distribute the source for your creation under the GPL. Or am I wong?

    Unfortunately you are quite right.
    I would not work in a lot of cases, but in some instances, like this one, it might. Things like these need to gain momentum, linux has come a long way, in time the big boys will probably see the benefit of having their technologies available on this platform.

  • Linux Licencing Fund (Score:4)

    by Pascal of S ( 23541 ) on Thursday March 25, 1999 @03:21AM (#1963636) Homepage
    From the FAQ:
    OpenGL® is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc., who quite reasonably only licence the name to be used by
    products which have been tested to comply with the specification. Since testing costs money, there are no free licenced versions
    of OpenGL.

    Licencing is, especially for companies wanting to use Linux, a big issue. There are quite a few projects that could get seriously underway if there was a fund or what ever that could pay some of these fees.
    It would greatly enhance the acceptability for larger institutions.
    Maybe in this case it might get some game-writers to get into Linux games. I don't care much for games, put there seem to be an awful lot of people who do.
  • Would I be justified in hoping that iD's forthcoming shrink-wrapped Linux release of Quake III [shugashack.com] will help a lot to make the graphics hardware people more keenly aware of Linux/X/Mesa? iD's clout is considerable, after all: isn't OpenGL's current position and visibility in the mainstream largely thanks to Quake?

    Of course, how great the effect will be will depend partly on how well Linux Q3A sells. I think our duty is clear. :)

  • Boards with the new TNT2 chipset are about to debut, and it's specs make it look great for both gaming and OpenGL work (hi-res, 32 bit Z buffer).

    But there doesn't seem to be anything going on. Are Nvidia being uncooperative? Do we ned a mini-campaign to get their attention? They are #2 behind 3Dfx in the windows world. Apparently their strategy is to prevent any possible sales to Linux users. ;-)

  • yeah. there's a kernel option for an additional term-only head, in 2.2.x at least...

    I heard cormack was working on multi-head for q3a. I think I might become something horrible if I had three, four monitors surrounding me during ctf. dribble, dribble, slurp.

    d

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