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XFree86 4.0 vs. XFree86 3.3.x 122

Posted by CmdrTaco from the x-actly-what-ya-want-to-know dept.
Patrick Mullen writes "I've recently compiled a comparison of XFree86 4.0 vs. 3.3.x. The review includes benchmarks, an overview on 4.0, the bugs still in 4.0 and a few other tidbits. " Its a bit sparse but its a good overview piece. It looks as if its definitely not for everyone quite yet.
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XFree86 4.0 vs. XFree86 3.3.x More

XFree86 4.0 vs. XFree86 3.3.x

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  • Haiku (Score:2)

    by 575 ( 195442 )
    Should I upgrade now?
    X Free Four-point-oh looks good
    But will my box crash?
  • IIRC, mesa is the OGL library behind GLX, and is part of the Xfree distribution now. I think the author may be confused. Am I mis-remembering here?

  • What I like most about XF4 is it's speed on my laptop. My laptop only has 16 megs of memory, and it rips now. -LW
  • ... is Quake 3!
    With the 3.3...... release I couldn't run Q3A
    with my TNT2 but now it works just fine.

    Thank you NVIDIA.

    (Well I really want opensource drivers but theese drivers really are good)
  • XF4 has only cored out twice on my laptop since the day I installed it. (about a week after it came out)

    It's never crashed on my workstation, but its hard to configure.

    -LW
  • Unfortunately, with all new releases, some things just don't work quite as planned. Since it's Open-Source some of these problems can be expected
    What can he mean?

  • Questionable benchmarks (Score:3)

    by bconway ( 63464 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @02:48AM (#1030631) Homepage
    The specs on the GeForce look nice, but I find the 3dfx benchmarks quite questionable. I installed X4.0 by wiping /usr/X11R6 clean and using a standard RPM install, followed by an RPM install of the Glide 3.x drivers. Quake 3 worked out of the box, and my framerates have been approximately 20% higher. I'm curious as to exactly how he configured his card and whether he was in fact using the correct drivers. This seems a bit odd. I've only heard good things about the improvements using the Voodoo3 cards from a number of people.

  • Another comparison. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02, 2000 @02:51AM (#1030632)
    You can also find information comparing driver support between XF86 3.3.x and XF86 4.0 here [xfree86.org] at the XFree86 website. You'll find that many popular graphics chipsets have yet to be ported to XF86 4.0.
  • Has anyone else been having trouble getting to Nvidia's site? I'm getting errors about the hostname not being valid. It's been like this since at least yesterday.

    matt
  • It's also very slow. You see on my main desktop ( A humble P200 with 64 megs and a 4 meg S3-Virge ) it takes several minutes to load X. Most of that wait time you have a blank screen.

    Sure, X4 doesn't support many chips the X3 supports. However there is no need for it to support them as both versions of X are compatible and Mandrake has already demonstrated how to ship and install both.

    With a little refinement they will be able switch X version depending on Video hardware. And of course OSS means that every Linux and *BSD vendor can copy what they do at will.

  • I'm pretty darn excited about XFree86's support for this. Should make configuration a lot simpler. I've never been able to get the color depth under X that I could get from Windows.

    rusty

  • Um... XF4's architecture is vastly different from before... that's why you bump major version numbers.
  • Wrong... The license changed (with release 3.0) from GPL to something compatible to X's license.

    Adam

  • Re:Mesa Less deisrable? (Score:3)

    by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @02:57AM (#1030638) Homepage
    No, that sounds about correct. But the author is definitely somewhat confused, as this quote illustrates:
    GLX: This is SGI's OpenGL extension. [...]
     Um, using the term "extension" in the same sentence as OpenGL really makes people assume that you're talking about an actual API extension [sgi.com], but here this is not the case. GLX is simply the platform-specific glue that connects OpenGL to a platform's particular resources. In the case of GLX, the platform is the X Window System, of course. On Windows there is WGL [microsoft.com] (pronounced "wiggle"), and on Macs they use something called agl (no link, sorry). GLX also provides network transparancy, since that is a feature of X.

  • Some commentary... (Score:3)

    by adamk ( 67660 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @02:59AM (#1030639)

    "With the present state, 3dfx is actually behind on DRI drivers, which is rather surprising."

    They are behind for a couple reasons:

    a) Precision Insight (PI) was more concerned with taking advantage of all the cards features than they were with optimizations. This should hopefully be changing in the near future.

    b) 3dfx seems to be just as concerned with supporting the Voodoo4/5 when they're released as they are with supporting the Voodoo3, and PI has been working in that direction.

    "The only explanation I can come up with is because XF86-4.0 is less proven than 3.3.x 3dfx's drivers proved to be very fast even without direct hardware access, and without true OpenGL-which may be the reason why the new implementation is so weak. Which brings me to my next point..."

    In fact, the 3dfx has always used direct rendering for 3d acceleration under X, but now they are using Precision Insight's Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), a different form of direct rendering.

    "nVidia pushed the drivers out the door almost immediately..."

    That is just wrong... It took an extremely long time for nVidia to release their drivers after they said they'd be releasing high performance 3D driver for 4.0.

  • Re:What's X like? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    we're trying to keep the scene free of idiots like yourself

    YHBT. YHL. HAND.
  • X is basically a hardware interface, and those other things you mentioned are window managers(technically, GNOME and Enlightenment are user interface suites, which both include a window manager. GNOME uses Enlightenment, KDE uses KWM.)
    You can run x without them (try it sometime, just type X on the console. alt, ctrl, backspace will get you out)
    As to which window manager is better, it depends what you like. I like the GNOME interface a lot, but it takes up a lot of resources, so I usually use GNUstep.
  • I too have compiled XF4 at home, but I have a problem with it...and it's a rather strange problem..

    I can start the X server and do most things alright in it ( some pixels here and there don't quite work right, specially in XMMS but hey, it's okay, XFree4 is still beta right? )

    But if I switch to a VT and then back, the X desktop is totally messed up, we're talking virtually unrecognizable, the colours are all wrong.

    It sounds like ( to me ) that whatever buffer it writes the screen to when switching isn't quite saving all the information, or is writing back to the screen wrong.

    Yes I have looked at the code, unfortunatly I'm not a Master C Programmer ( yet ) so it doesn't all make sense to me.

    My advice, if you have a Rage 128, ( or at least an AGP Xpert 2000 with 32 megs of ram ), you're probably better of with XFree86 3.3.6.

    Then again it could just be my motherboard but somehow I doubt it.

    Any ideas?
  • > In their mind, you're just another person who
    > can't keep up with technology. So is the FSF
    > just trying to one-up MS in their own game by
    > releasing XFree86 4.0? Seems like it to me.

    Definitely not. If you take a closer look at the new Xfree 4.0 version, you'll find that it is indeed greatly different from 3.x; different enough to warrant the jump in version numbers.

    The underlying architecture was completely remodeled, the insane replication of code and effort for the seperate monolithic x-servers has been replaced by a modular design that will even allow cross-OS reuse of driver modules, the font handling has changed and so on..

  • Re:XFree86 4.0: it's all about marketing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe its entirely true, and maybe version hype causes it all, but...

    It is still open, and it is still free (like beer)!

    I can take a little hype under these conditions.
  • This means we'll start seeing more standard 3D acceleration on cards-not just 3dfx anymore. With the present state, 3dfx is actually behind on DRI drivers, which is rather surprising.

    Actually, it's the other drivers that are behind

    The new GLX extension is OpenGL 1.2 compatible, meaning here comes 3D graphics, CAD and other such professional uses. This is starting to make Mesa look less and less desirable

    And Mesa happens to be at the heart of the OpenGL implementation in XF4...

    especially after seeing how OGL 1.2 performs on nVidia's .90 beta DRI drivers.

    whose OpenGL 1.2 implementation is not complete/100% conformant

    Taking Initiative It's clear who really wants this. nVidia clearly is fighting for victories on both Windows and Linux-what next, Macintosh? nVidia pushed the drivers out the door almost immediately, and in some cases it shows, but in others the drivers prove to be exceptional for performance-even if unoptimized. If nVidia gets on the ball and optimizes the drivers, they're looking to destroy Windows performance. I've never seen performance quite this fast on the first release candidate. Now only if nVidia would get off their lazy asses and release something new, maybe from the Detonator 500 series of drivers. We can all wish, right? Matrox also looks to be getting their hands in things, as they always do. They made the push on Windows, and proved to be one of the first mainstream cards to have OpenGL, and again they're a pioneer. The more the better, I say.

    Which has very little to do with XF4, which is what is suppossed to being reviewed. Nvidia released a new server and a matching OpenGL implementation (without programmer's documentation or at least a dammed header, mind you). An own OpenGL implementation (or SGI's) is supposed to be behind it...

    Unfortunately, with all new releases, some things just don't work quite as planned. Since it's Open-Source some of these problems can be expected, and it is also free. Here's a run-down of the problems faced in this release:

    And you are comparing apples and oranges here... it doesn't say which Voodoo driver is being used, and I'd suppose it's compared against the nVidia recently released drivers. The point is nVidia says their drivers are beta, while the Voodoo ones are still in development.

    I'm kinda surprised taco posted this, next thing he'll post is my (rather long) email that says "XFree86 sucks" or "XFree86 rulez"... :-(

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I'm pretty darn excited about XFree86's support for this. Should make configuration a lot simpler. I've never been able to get the color depth under X that I could get from Windows.

    To be honest, I was pretty underwhelmed with it under Windows - it was undependable to say the least. When your card and monitor get together (TNT2 and IBM C72 monitor if you are interested) and decide that it's okay to have 640x480 at 32bit colour, but 8 and 16bit don't exist, and then all your refresh rates decide that 60Hz is enough for anyone, you would probably do what I did and turn it off. (And yes, I hacked at my Windows config for days to try and fix it - another great example of plug and pray).

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • I've got a ATI Rage Fury Pro, and I see the same sort of problems. I haven't had time to sit down and figure it out. Of course, I'm not sure I can figure it out. It's just nice to know we're both not insane. (at least on this issue)

    I run Gnome, and the cards in Asile Riot don't draw properly. They seem to draw transparently.

    FWIW, kernel 2.2.15, XF86 4.0, Gnome 1.15.
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • Anyone else notice that this is hosted on a School website? [k12.mn.us]
    Since when is Linux used in Schools? Let alone a Elementry/Middle/High school.

  • Can anyone tell me if X is better than GNOME or KDE or Enlightenment or any of the others?

    Actually, you're already using X. You just don't know it. Linux/Unix GUIs are divided into two parts--a server and a client. XFree86 is the X-Windows server. GNOME and KDE are actually the clients on your system. Most of the Linux distribuitions use XFree86, but there are other X servers.

    This is further complicated by the fact that both GNOME and KDE also require a "window manager". GNOME 1.2 uses Sawfish as a window manager. Most previous versions of GNOME use Enlightenment. KDE uses it's own K Window Manager.

    If I've got anything wrong, I hope that someone else will correct it. I'm just trying to offer help from one newbie to another.

    rusty

  • Gnome [gnome.org] doesn't use Enlightenment [enlightenment.org] anymore, but rather Sawfish [sourceforge.net] which is supposed to fit in better with how E does things... There's an interesting article What's New in Gnome 1.2 [linuxpower.org] on LinuxPower [linuxpower.org]

  • I've already emailed it to the coders from PI and XFree Bugs.

    But yeah, it's nice to know i'm not alone :)

    it's a problem using plain old twm as well, but for some reason the effect is lessened if you use 8 bpp depth. I recompiled the r128 driver with debugging support enabled if anyone wants a look-see.

    Tis most weird.

    Oh BTW.

    Kernel 2.2.13, XF86 4.0, twm.
  • I've never been able to get the color depth under X that I could get from Windows

    IIRC, DDC2 allows bidirectional communications between the videocard and the monitor. This gives a way to obtain information on the monitor (i.e. model, characteristics, current setup, etc.) and a way to set parameters on the monitor (contrast, luminosity, geometry correction, etc.). It is handy, because that means that you won't have to look up in the monitor's manual the supported ranges of frequences. But this stops here for what concerns X configuration.

    Color depth is a matter of the videocard (and its driver), and DDC shouldn't be of any help here.

  • Isn't too easy to troll a *presumed* newbie ?

    Unless the original post is a troll itself, that is.
    The original post seems too polite to be true, but I actually answered a question very close to this on a newbies forum, so my estimates are : 55% Troll 45% True.

  • Why do I only keep seeing statements and hype like that ONLY on slashdot?
  • Really, then why does nearly every report on the matter claim that linux is growing faster than all other OSes combined?

    I'll play devil's advocate on this one. ;)

    Linux is growing faster because it has so much room to grow. The real competitors to Linux are already well established in their markets, so growing... for them... isn't as easy as it is for Linux. The market is also expanding rapidly, which gives Linux a more equal footing for expansion. That can distort those numbers.

    With that said, I still don't agree that Linux is failing and is never going to pick up. There is no evidence of that, and far too much evidence to the contrary.

    I would not cite Linux's growth in the marketplace as compared to its competitors though, as I personally don't think that is an accurate measure of its success. Instead, I'd mention where Linux is taking market share away from its competitors. There is a distinct difference between the two in a market that is expanding as rapidly as this one.

    LouZiffer

  • Cool.

    I was going to play around in my free time to see if I could find the source (no pun intended) of the problem. XF86 it is. Sounds like a good time to play with some video drivers.
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • I actually got the register specs and SDK from ATI, so when i have a chance i'm gonna sit down, relearn C, crank open a couple of printed out PDFs and see what I can figures out.

    Like...when I have free time ( what's that? ) or sumttin'

  • Re:Haiku (Score:3)

    by 575 ( 195442 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @03:30AM (#1030659) Journal
    Flames burst from nowhere
    Anonymous Coward speaks
    Wear your asbestos
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • May I suggest trying a newer r128 driver? The author of the 3D drivers for Rage128 cards (Kevin Martin, at Precision Insight) has also done some work in the 2d driver (which I believe he originally wrote) at the same time. You can pull the DRI for Rage128 cards from cvs, and not only build 3D drivers, but build a newer 2D driver. Check out dri.sourceforge.net

    Adam
  • relearn C
    Come on! It's like falling off a bike. You never forget how.

    free time
    I think my wife has some of that scheduled for me sometime. I'm not sure, I'll have to ask her. :)
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • I will do that, thanks!

  • Eh, it's been way too many years....I was able to write hello world without any errors straight from memory though :)

    as for free time...my g/f might have a say in that as well :) *Unmaskable interrupt*

  • I don't know. I averaged 40-50fps on my C466 w/ a V3-3000 using XF86 3.3.5. When I switched to 4.0 that dropped down to 20fps or so. Granted that was with 64mb of ram and it jumped a little (but not much) with 128.

    Oh well...I get 70fps or so with my GeForce GTS, so I'm happy.
  • Works For Me(TM).

    Firewall/proxy problem?

  • Virtual Consoles cause crashes for me (Score:3)

    by robwicks ( 18453 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @03:49AM (#1030668) Homepage

    If I run X using startx, then switch to another VC using ctrl-alt F2, then log on as root and start an X session to use some graphical tools, then quit the root session, if I do Alt-F7 to get to the original session, I get a crash every time. I suppose a positive result of this is that I use sudo much more frequently, but I don't even recall some of the names of some of the KDE tools to run them from the command line. It's a bit inconvenient. Apart from that, things work fine. Q3Arena works well, though I don't see any improvement when I activate r_smp 1 to get SMP support. In fact, I get about .4 fps lower than with r_smp set to 0. I'm still too new at this to really troubleshoot that properly, though.

    Mandrake 7.1 beta, PII333 SMP x2, 256MB RAM

  • support multiple graphics cards, multiple monitors, and graphics drivers can now directly access the hardware.

    Well, are we talking about NT or W9x? NT did not have multiple monitors supported until service pack 4 for 4.0, and became standard in 2000. W9x got this in W98, and it didn't work too well when I tried to use my extra video card and 15" montor. You could have a text based second monitor for many years on Linux and Windows or so that is what I thought. If I am wrong then someone please correct me. Either way the features that you speak of were not supported by Windows for many years.
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • Re:XFree86 4.0: it's all about marketing (Score:3)

    by Mr Z ( 6791 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @03:54AM (#1030670) Homepage Journal
    How many of them have given you a condescending smile when you mentioned that you use X-Windows 3.x? In their mind, you're just another person who can't keep up with technology. So is the FSF just trying to one-up MS in their own game by releasing XFree86 4.0? Seems like it to me.

    Nice troll! I'll bite. Lessee, where do I start.

    • First of all, until XFree 4.0 came out, most people didn't give a rodent's sphinter what version number X server you were running. X was X. XFree 4.0 changes that a bit since it does provide a huge boatload of features. But still, I don't think I've ever bothered to talk about what version X server I run with almost anyone else. For most things it just doesn't matter. Which brings me to my next point...
    • The version numbers for an X server do not compare to the version numbers for Microsoft Windows! It's a bit like comparing a JDK version number to Internet Exporer's version number -- it does Java, right? Wrong. "Microsoft Windows 3.x" vs "Microsoft Windows NT 4.0" is a huge difference, since it refers to the whole OS. The closest thing you could compare to is, perhaps, Linux distribution version numbers, which I do agree are inflated a little.
    • The FSF doesn't produce XFree86. The XFree86 Project, Inc. [xfree86.org] does. XFree86 even comes under (and this is important) a non GPL license [xfree86.org] . The FSF would never do such a thing.

    Why don't you do a little research occasionally?

    --Joe
    --
  • Did you try GNOME with XFree4.0 ? On my box with RadHat's GNOME it had a problem repaining the background on the root window.
  • Agreed with that, it is also poorly documented, as this following claim about 3DFX drivers...

    [...]3dfx's drivers proved to be very fast even without direct hardware access.

    That's wrong, in a recent review on linuxgames [linuxgames.com] , 3DFX scored last against Matrox, Nvidia and others in the speed comparison between the windows drivers and the linux drivers.

    ---
    guillaume

  • I run Q3A on XFree86 3.3.6 with utah-glx.
    I have Riva TNT graphic card.
  • For my Rage128 All-in-Wander it worked out of the box with libglide2x.so downloaded on aside - I did not find the config entry to disable the GLIDE support.

  • Performance for XSHM extension also went up (Score:3)

    by Jorrit ( 19549 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @04:04AM (#1030675) Homepage
    In my Crystal Space engine which can also run in software rendering mode I noticed a big improvement in performance (from 25 FPS to 31 FPS) when going from XFree 3.3 to XFree 4.0. This has nothing to do with hardware rendering. I'm talking about software here. Other people reported this too.

    I wonder what happened there?

    Greetings,
  • Well it does work but...
    The speed diffrence however is noticable.
    I can't confirm it but if I'm wrong I'm quite sure
    someone will say so...

  • It's a dot (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hi "Bruce.", wink wink.

    My name is "Rob Malda."

    I am a dot, dot.

  • Open source software has bugs just like everything else. Xfree its still far far far from perfect. Not until I get decent multimedia speed. Try playing mpegs at full screen or even 200%, you're lucky to get 15 of the 30 frames.
  • I found that XFree86 4.0 would not detect my graphics card, although it worked with 3.3.x. However I am using an old card (onboard ET4000), so it's possible that support for this configuration isn't so important any more.
  • I'm using it as we speak, no problems. I've had October Gnome and now Gnome 1.2, and they both work fine. Maybe your vid drivers?

    If you're still using E you might try going with sawfish. E on my machine (P2-500, 128M) dragggs. Sawfish is heaven-sent though.

  • The 60Hz is probably hardcoded in your video card's bios. VESA doesn't allow for a standard way to set this. The only option is to not use VESA, or to look for some binary at nVidia's website that might instruct your video card otherwise. (I don't know if nVidia has that; I know that Matrox has it.) Of course it's much simpler to just disable VESA and use a native driver if there is one.

    The reason all cards default to 60Hz in VESA mode is that they want it to work on all monitors.

    At least this is my understanding of it. I can imagine that if DDC is working properly, the monitor would just tell the videocard to use a higher refresh rate, but apparently that doesn't happen.
  • I have a similar system-- AMD K6/2 400, 64 MB RAM, and an S3 ViRGE (GX?). Well, X 3.3.5 started up quickly, but 4.0 sits there for 20-30 seconds before showing anything. Blank screen, keyboard doesn't work. I would GREATLY appreciate any thoughts or comments as to the cause of this peculiar problem.

    Also, the S3 ViRGE card is *supposed* to have a some 3D-acceleration. Is there any hope for that, or am I condemned to having to shell out $50-$150 for a real 3D card?

    Thanks,

    -lf
  • I've been running XFree86 4.0 for almost a month now.

    I compiled it myself, installed it on Debian 2.1, with my NVIDIA TNT2 AGP and the NVIDIA drivers.

    I've only had one or two lockups in the meantime. I'll likely upgrade to 4.0.1 soon.

    My instructions for what I did to compile and install it are at http://www.antimeta.com/tmp/ [antimeta.com]

    --
    Marc A. Lepage (aka SEGV)
  • Oh, and Quake 3 runs at almost the same framerate as my colleague's *identical* machine running Windows 2000. Even the colours and textures now look the same, and they didn't before with my old drivers. (That's actually not so great, as we agree that the Windows look is more washed out than my old Linux look.)

    --
    Marc A. Lepage (aka SEGV)
  • This is nothing to do with XFree4, the Linux kernel or anything else in the system. The plain fact is that the SMP optimisations in Q3A for Linux don't work and ID haven't got around to fixing them. (Although to be fair writing good threaded code is very difficult.)

    Much as I hate to say it Win2K or NT is probably the best platform for SMP Q3A. However I have yet to see any benchmarks that show that Q3A is faster using SMP under NT than uniprocessor under 98. The limiting factor in your system is going to be the PII 333 cpu.

    On my machine (PIII 500) large FFA matches slow to a crawl (30-40fps) as they become CPU bound. Duels and the like stay firmly above 100fps.

    -dp
  • for anyone curious I found this, http://www.deb ian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0005/msg01828. html [debian.org], regarding why Debian has not produced official 4.0 debs. Looks like they are waiting for 4.0.1 which has support for Sparc, bugfixes, security fixes, etc... the "brown paper bag" release.

    -l

  • The FSF would never do such a thing.

    I like to play devil's advocate. :) Except for flex and ncurses.

    I just hope that ncurses keeps the BSD-style license after the five year agreement to keep that license is up. If it stays with the current license, I can see it becoming standard on more OS's (of course I thought it would at least a couple of years ago).
  • this comparaison is possibly intereting for gamer and others 3D user.
    but, what about performance of XF40 VS XF3.x on a P120 with 16MO RAM ???

    which one is the more ligth with AS1.0 ?

    in slackware 3.0 we belive.

    bye bye !
  • This statement in the article raised the hair on the back of my head. They state, "Since the new drivers use direct hardware access, no need to be root to play games anymore. This is sure handy because it integrates more functions into a standard user, making the unprivileged user much more practical. Combine this with a distribution like Mandrake, and you may never need to logout again to play Quake 3."

    Not sure where they get their info from, but I can play Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament without beeing root. I even installed them without being root.

    What they are actually implying is if the device driver (in my case /dev/3dfx) has owner and group set to root, yes you must be root. Simple fix is to change the device driver to something like games (which the 3dfx docs tell you to do BTW) and you don't need to be root to play Q3A.

    I think they should have done much more research for their article before making clear mistakes like this. Now, XFree86 4.0 makes some things nicer but their statement is completely in left field.
  • In fact, I get about .4 fps lower than with r_smp set to 0.

    That's because Carmack never got around to enabling SMP on the Linux version -- r_smp doesn't do anything =)

  • Your X server is what controls your video card and mouse. That's all it does; X does not have menus, windows, or any of that stuff, because of the way it was designed. It's also a network protocol, which enables you to run remote applications and have them display on your local terminal. My ISP got pissed at me when I tried this from their BSDI box...

    The windows and such are controlled by your window manager. Window managers are what give you your basic menus, your titlebars, window borders, etc. Enlightenment is a window manager, as are fvwm, twm, olvwm, afterstep, windowmaker, and dozens of others.

    GNOME, KDE, CDE, and UDE are desktop environments (although I've not used UDE). They're basicly application suites. GNOME programs, for example, use the GNOME libraries, and are all similar as far as interface goes. They try to be consistant. KDE and CDE come with their own window managers (KWM for KDE and mwm for CDE), but GNOME does not; that's why you'll often see it paired with enlightenment or sawfish (or many others). I don't know about UDE, I've not tried it.

    All these work together to give you your GUI experience. You can use a different X server, for example, and not have to change any settings for your window manager or desktop environment.

    The best way to learn this is to try different window managers and see what they have to offer.
  • You're confusing two things. X windows is a lower layer that supports whatever window manager (KDE, Enlightenment, etc.) people care to write to use it. They depend on X already being there.

  • The review you linked to is not very accurate. Instead of using the most recent 3dfx drivers (for the DRI under 4.0), they used the old direct rendering method under 3.3.*

    Almost every build of the DRI that I've done from cvs since shortly after the release of 4.0, the 3D drivers have been faster, and higher quality, than the old drivers.

    Also bear in mind that there is much more to accelerated 3D than just Quake3.

    Adam
  • Java code for GUI applications is too slow for some stuff. Java's not a compiled language (normally, anyway) so it's not as fast as what a program written in C/C++ would be. Depending on the application, this can be a big drawback.

    Plus, you have to install a java runtime environment and set it up in order to run java stuff. Last time I downloaded blackdown's JDK it was 10 megs (and their server was really slow). JDK's are normally not included in linux distributions for some reason (prolly lisencing, but I don't know for sure).

    GTK+ is a native C toolkit, so GUI programs in C are often written using it. It's the basis for GNOME. KDE uses QT for its toolkit, since it's written in C++.

  • S3 Virge cards only have 3D support under 3.3.*

    I'd suggest you checkout utah-glx.sourceforge.net for more info.

    Adam
  • So here's my question -- do 3d games work reasonably well now ( with my TNT card ) ? I'd love to see some more benchmarks with the different video cards at different resolutions. I just got HG2 for Windows, largely because I have no idea if I'd be paying more for much lower performance if I got it for Linux.

    I have little doubt that XF4.0 is going to make games somewhat snappier, but I'd like to see how much.

  • > whose OpenGL 1.2 implementation is not complete/100% conformant

    Care to elaborate?

  • Also, the S3 ViRGE card is *supposed* to have a some 3D-acceleration. Is there any hope for that, or am I condemned to having to shell out $50-$150 for a real 3D card?

    Even if it did support 3D acceleration with the ViRGE, there would be no point in using it. The ViRGE is a first generation 3D accelerator, a class of chipsets sometimes not-so-affectionally referred to as 3D deccelerators. Why? Because the chipsets were so primitive and slow that a good CPU could do the job faster than these things and turning on 3D acceleration reduces your performance. If you are at all interested in 3D acceleration, get another card! Stay far, far away from the ViRGE. You don't have a good excuse not to. A voodoo 3 2000 or regular TNT 2 could be found for around $50 if you look hard enough. Sure, they are not the latest and greatest cards out there, but they're not bad either. And they are far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far faster than a ViRGE in anything 3D. Besides, even if you could get the ViRGE working and for some reason you didn't care about the performance penalty of using it, you'd be hard pressed to find a modern 3D application it will actually work with because its feature set is so limited. The ViRGE is something of a joke to people who know hardware.

  • games? (Score:1)

    by drew ( 2081 )
    i find it irrratating that the only bugs he mentions about xfree 4.0 are related to playing games. because the article isn't directed towards gamers. at the end he made a comment that "i doubt you're a serious cutting edge linux user if you're not using 4.0". god forbid there be cutting edge users that dont use their linux boxen for games. what about the bugs that i care about? like that fact that when i ctrl-alt-f1 to another virtual terminal and then ctrl-alt-f7 back to x, the screen is all black until i can trick the monitor into switching modes? (activating xscreensaver seems to do the trick). or the fact that i can't use an image with black in it as my desktop wallpaper, because it not ever redraw that area of the desktop? there are plenty of bugs other than the ones he mentioned. and despite the recent kick for games on linux, there are still plenty of us who dont use linux for games.

    that being said, i use xfree 4.0 and am fairly happy with it. it is fairly stable. i have never had it crash on me, and all of the bugs that i have found are pretty much just minor annoyances. (although it would be nice to be able to use transparent Eterms again....
  • GLX

    This is SGI's OpenGL extension. Several companies have been working hard at this, mainly Precision Insight. Companies that obviously benefit from this have been supporting them, like ATI, 3dfx, Matrox, and SGI. These sound like good players to me. My only question is why nVidia did not support the project. It's unfortunate nVidia would not support the project ...

    The author seems to be mixing PI's DRI work for XF4.0 (which includes GLX implementation) and SGI's GLX (OpenGL on X). NVidia's drivers implement GLX as well (not surprisingly because their OpenGL implementation is partly made by SGI.)
  • I might have to try
    Installing this this weekend.
    Wish me best of luck.
  • it would figure that x would have to crash on me right after i post that, just to spite me...
  • I've got X4 running on SuSE 6.4 on two machines, both at home and in my office. Here's what I did. After installing 6.4, I used Yast and went to the SuSE ftp site under install. The rpms are there under SuSE/X/XFree86/XFree86-4.0-SuSE/suse64. Yast recognized that these are newer packages than 3.3.6 and let me upgrade X. I selected everything except glide, xextra and xxprt. I also installed SaX2 but at first it would not work. I ran xf86config and generated the XF86Config file, and it worked fine. Later I found that Sax2 requires perl-tk and perl-gtk packages to work, and then I used it to setup a new configuration. Right now I am at 1280x1024, 32 bit, with a virtual screen size of 1600x1200, and running Gnome 1.2. It is fast and looks great!

  • Multi-headed works well. (Score:4)

    by gukin ( 14148 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @05:57AM (#1030704)
    For the last few years, I've used metrolink's multi-headed server. For $40 it was a steal (at least compared to XiGraphics $350 server and the multi-headed stuff on our RS/6000's.) It was easy to set up, install and reletively stable. It didn't work perfectly though, it left the mouse pointer behind on one of the screens and got "weird" on some scrollbar functions.

    I compiled and installed XFree86 on my RH-6.1 system and, using xf86config, got my first head going in a few short minutes.

    I then read _gasp_ the manual page for XF86config which told me everything I need to do to set up the multi-headed stuff.

    The documentation (if you bother to read it) is well written and very usable.

    Once I got the multi-headed stuff going add +xinerama to /etc/X11/gdm-conf and _poof_ I could drag stuff from screen to screen to screen.

    I now have a three headed beast with one AGP Matrox G200 and two Matrox Millenium II PCI cards.
    Performance is completely acceptable and it is really cool that I can define different monitor types per head.

    My G200 is driving a 21" while the two Millenium II's are running old Viewsonic 7's.

    The Xinerama feature is SOOOOO handy. I can drag unimportant stuff to the outboard monitors and use the big central for the important stuff.

    XFree86 4.0's performance and flexibility is FAR superior to ANY other multi-headed X-server I have used.

    If you can't read a man page and don't need Xinerama (oh yeah and have lots of monitors laying around) Metrolink is a good way to go.

    Still, reading a man page is not too much to pay.

    Oh yeah, the RPM's for RedHat are available via rawhide.

    Gee I hope I didn't sound too stupid.
  • Has anybody else noticed visual artifacts with the nVidia drivers (.90?) I'm running XF86 4.0 on RHL 6.1, and when I run an X program, while the performance rocks, there's subtle visual artifacts all over the black areas of the screen. Card is a TNT2.

    ---------------------------------
  • I've been running XF4 for some time now. I have a Geforce, and I've used both NVIDIA's and XF's own driver. The XF driver performance was much better than in XF3.3.6, but NVIDIA's driver is even faster than that. Also, NVIDIA's opengl support is quite solid (provided it's closed source and all, but at least it works.) So yes I'm satisfied.

    The only thing that does not work (tried nvidia and xf drivers) is dpms. I used to be able to do 'xset dpms force off' to shut down my monitor, but with XF4, this no longer does anything. Anybody know if it's supposed to be supported?
  • Actually GLX *IS* an extention in the way X uses the term extention. Just as Display [Post,Ghost]script, or MIT Shared Memory are extentions.
  • It's also very slow. You see on my main desktop ( A humble P200 with 64 megs and a 4 meg S3-Virge ) it takes several minutes to load X. Most of that wait time you have a blank screen.

    Something is broken. On this 233 MHz machine it starts in a few seconds. Switch back to the text console while it's loading and see if there are any helpful messages. Check your sound card support (I had this problem). Check the log/messages file.
    --
  • The one time I tried to install XF4.0, Windowmaker stopped working (been so long I can't remember exactly why). Has anyone gotten them to work together?
  • Not until I get decent multimedia speed. Try playing mpegs at full screen or even 200%, you're lucky to get 15 of the 30 frames.

    I don't know whats wrong with _your_ setup, but I can play NFS mounted dvd rip mpegs on cd over my net in "Zoom" (200%) mode in mpegtv (closed source software!) at 30+ fps with ease in XFree86-4 ;)

  • I suspect as much. I wold like to know what can be done about this.

  • Thank you for correcting me on these. I looked at both of these, and it appears that GNU distributes Flex, but that the FSF has not been assigned the copyright. It's actually distributed under the BSD license. More importantly, the lexers it generates carry NO restrictions from Flex itself. :-) It appears that ncurses is actually under an MIT style license.

    So, I stand corrected! Thanks! It looks like I slacked a little on my research. Oops.

    --Joe
    --
  • If you want, you can e-mail me your /var/log/XFree86.0.log file and your /etc/X11/XF86Config file...

    I can't guarantee anything (not having an S3 Virge to test it on), but I might be able to help you out.

    Adam
  • It's that GUI that M$ keeps denying.

  • Crock (Score:3)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Friday June 02, 2000 @06:59AM (#1030715)
    Heh. I read this little write up last night (well, early this morning) while I was looking for info on getting OpenGL/Quake3 in XF86 v4 working with my G400. (Anyone able to help me out? I'm not sure where to start. I have X4 installed, but don't know if it's installed right, etc..)

    Even with my limitted knowledge, his article/write up seemed off color and slightly unfactual. (re: MESA not being in X4's implimentation of GL). It surprises me that the slashdot people don't read the articles themselves before posting them to slashdot, in order to check and see how factual they are. Or maybe they do, and just overlooked it. And then again, maybe they leave the crap-testing to moderators and posters. :)

    -------
    CAIMLAS


  • Your X server is what controls your video card and mouse. That's all it does; X does not have menus, windows, or any of that stuff, because of the way it was designed.

    And this is why it's shocking that X is as bulky as it is. It does very little, yet sure requires obscene overhead in order to accomplish it. Isn't this one of the shortcomings of Windows?
  • What I would like to know is: which video card is best supported for direct rendering under Xfree86 4.0 ? I know nVidia's driver's are closed source, but I guess that's excusable if the work fully. Last I heard the ATI drivers were still in development. I haven't heard anything about how well the Matrox drivers work. And the 3dfx drivers don't fully support Mesa/ OpenGL, right?

  • nVidia: Closed source, but good (great?) performance and decent stability for most people (although I got way too many lock ups to use my TNT2).

    ATI Rage128: Open source, but still in development. Decent support for AGP cards, lousy (quasi-decent?) support for PCI cards, at least until Precision Insight (or someone else) writes kernel support for PCI GART.

    Matrox: The G400 is supported under the DRI, the G200 is supported under utah-glx (and possibly under the DRI), the 2D quality is supposed to be great, and the 3D quality is pretty decent, from what I've heard.

    3dfx: Supported under XFree86 3.3.* and XFree86 4.0 in both 2D and 3D. Under XFree86 3.3* you need to have Mesa compiled with Glide support to use accelerated 3D. Under XF4.0, you need to have Glide_V3-DRI installed, and a tdfx dri driver.

    Adam

  • WindowMaker works beautifully on my system under XF4.0.

    Adam
  • You do need to be root to run Q2, Q1, as well as all other older games that rely on SVGAlib

    SVGAlib isn't X.

  • # cd /usr/ports/x11/Xfree86-4
    # make install
    ===> XFree86-4.0 is forbidden: Root hole in X server, XFree86 developers seem to be ignoring us.

  • I can't say more good things about XFree86 4. Why? Primarily, because I can run programs that utilize GL along with my Riva TNT2-based card. Although the driver isn't open-source (write a nice letter to nvidia, please), it works well enough that I don't have to reboot to windows to play Quake. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things that could have happened to X.
    Anyway, just my $0.02
  • How 'bout the other way around? Think about it this way. There are no serious Linux 3D applications that can use the 3D accelerated drivers, (since most static link Mesa) so the only major 3D thing it can run at the moment are games! I'm sure this will change as 3D apps ar ported to Linux, but for now, Linux has nothing that wants to make me trade in MAX. Also, he was reffering to those running XFree 4.0 in general, not just the 3D stuff. Trust me, if you are a desktop user, you need XFree 4.0. I have not yet seen a crash and it is much faster than 3.3.x. In fact it restored my faith in Linux as an OS when I saw that finally XFree86 could blit stuff to the screen as fast as DirectDraw (windowed) could.
  • From the tinkering on it that I've done (thanks SuSE for putting it on CD) it looks pretty good. I just got a V3 for my Linux box so I may have to try to get that puppy working. Once it reaches a stable stage I think people will be all over it like lint on tape. Once Linux can play the games I want with reasonable speed I'll put it on all my boxes. And of course I want Photoshop, Gimp doesn't really stand up to PS in my opinion. Maybe the XFree people ought to get ahold of people like Adobe and such people in the graphics biz to get some colour certification on X. With good colour calibration on the free Unicies more professional apps that need said calibration will start porting. Apple got Adobe's support in a big way with their excellent colour management, maybe Linux can be next.

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