Open Source 3D Games

[D. Hageman]

On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:

> As long as you've got nvidia, you should be fine. I've only heard
> mediocre things from ATi.  It can be a bit tricky to get nvidia
> working if your distro upgrades kernels faster than they provide
> precompiled interfaces.  On the other hand, their configuration tools
> are quickly approaching Window's click and point interface.

I disagree with your comments about ATI.  I think they are solid, reliable 
cards and the r200 DRI driver that ships with X.org gives good quality 3D 
graphics.  I have found that most people that have trouble with "getting 
these cards to work" really don't have clue one about how all the parts of 
the system interact together.  I am not saying that this is a requirement 
for running Linux, but it might be for running certain distros.  I can say 
that RedHat/Fedora will pretty much configure it for you out of the box.

You can get a pretty interface to tweak the DRI driver(s) here:

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriConf

The worse problem with the ATI set of drivers is the slow support of new 
chipsets.  All of the new cards shipping from ATI now are from a series of 
chips they call the r300 series.  A r300 series driver is in the works and 
is fairly decent now, but still in heavy development.  I expect to see it 
put out to the general public in the X release.

I can't say anything about ATI's closed source drivers.  I try to stick 
with open source as much as I can for my systems.

-- 
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||  D. Hageman                    <dhageman at dracken.com>  ||
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