[SDL] openlGL win vs linux

[David Olofson]

On Saturday 27 September 2003 06.30, Michael Rickert wrote:
> > the same application written with SDL and opengl in
> > linux runs with a very
> > low framerate and not in win.
> >
> > am i miising some drivers??
> >
> > thanks
>
> Umm, very general question, but the answer is:
> probably. You'll need XFree86 4.2.0 or higher (I think
> that's the right version) to even allow hardware
> acceleration (via the DGA extension),
[...]

In the context of accelerated OpenGL, DGA doesn't really make much of 
a difference. It can give you h/w page flipping without totally 
bypassing the X server, but that's about it from the functional 
perspective, AFAIK. Either way, I have yet to see an OpenGL driver 
that uses DGA.

As to versions, I've used accelerated OpenGL with XFree86 3.x (3.3.x 
for sure; possibly some older version as well...), 4.1.x and 4.2.x, 
so far. In at least one case, the 3.x driver was faster than the 
4.1.x driver, though that was probably because the latter was newer 
and not as carefully optimized as the former.

The closed source ATI driver I'm using now is available for 4.1.x, 
4.2.x and 4.3.x. (Seems to be the same driver with minor tweaks to 
compile for each X version.) I believe the situation is similar with 
the closed source nVidia drivers as well.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
|  Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia.  |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
   --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---