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NVidia releases Linux drivers for X and GL 271

Posted by Hemos from the games-are-going-look-nicer dept.
Quite a number of you wrote in with the news that Nvidia has released the drivers for all of their chipsets, TNT2 included. The drivers are X and OpenGL, and are availible under the XFree86 license. To get the stuff, head over here.
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NVidia releases Linux drivers for X and GL More

NVidia releases Linux drivers for X and GL

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  • multiple windows really handy for side by side work in video editing . . .

    yes there is a reason . . . would have thought it was obvious.
  • running games in a window is shitty. am i the only one who feels this way?

    Yes. (-:

    I prefer to run games in a window while I'm debugging or monitoring something; that way I can also see the item that earns me money, and pause the game to attend to it if need be.
  • Thanks for the post. I checked around with some two gues, and they both said the tnt was a better choice. Guess il get more ram with the money I woulda spent.
  • Attention class. Quiet down please. Joey, give Sally her blouse back and sit down.

    Good. Now:

    You may be under the impression that moderation happens sequentially, as in "He's only been moderated to 4? That's not enough! I'll moderate him to FIVE!" I'm sure that's true at times, but I'll wager that in most cases, a number of folks moderate posts more or less at once. This happens in both directions. An only mildly retarded post may get wailed down to -1 if it's posted near the beginning of the overall thread, while a mildly intelligent post will top the charts at number 5.

    The Reason for this is simple: when there's fewer posts for moderators to choose from, more moderator's will moderate the same posts, hence the effects of moderation will be exaggerated.

    What's the Cure? They're the guys that wrote "Primary", which is an amazing song, but of no concern to us here. In terms of a cure for A Lack of Temperance in Moderation, I don't think we need one. It just doesn't matter. The system work Pretty Darn Well as it is, and that's a LOT better than Really Bad!

    If one were to impart a Fix, I think it would be along the lines of an algorhythm of sorts (no pun intended) which would cause the Strength of a single Act of Moderation (up or down) to vary in relation to the number of posts overall. It would no longer always be "one man, one vote".
    I must reassert, however, that I think this would be a cosmic waste of time.

    In other words...

    STOP WHINING!

    ;^D

    cheerz,
    -kent
  • Well, I didn't know it wasn't supposed to work, so I tried it out. It worked fine! A little slow, but pretty good.
  • This happened to me, as well.
  • Hmmm...I wasn't trying to be funny. What parts confused you?
  • On every line it gives you an error (there are two or three), just insert a ';' before the closing '}'. That fixed it for me.
  • I've got a TNT. I just got it running.

    It's definately doing software rendering at 32BPP.

    GL Screensavers run rather too fast, though, in
    16BPP :)

    However, it seems to be not synching to refresh
    when screensavers are run at -root, leading to
    high amounts of flicker -- anyone else seen this?
  • Yes, the embossing isn't the same as the Matrox method (Environment-mapped). However, I've yet to see any real comparison as to what sort of performance hit the G400 takes when it's enabled. So far there are very few games far enough along in development to even demo this feature, and none of the ones I've heard of (or seen screenshots of) have full-screen environmental bump maps. Most have it strictly limited to a few surfaces (water, maybe a player skin, not much more), and the only review I've seen that mentioned the performance hit had a pretty substantial number (can't recall what it was, or I'd post it). It's yet to be the hot feature that it might end up.

    I've been planning to build a new machine, so I've been looking at this sort of thing (about time I had a good gaming rig :), and right now my main problem is finding one of these TNT2 Ultras with a digital flatpanel output :(
    Of course, if Matrox gets their act together and offers better (and Linux) drivers, perhaps they'll get the spot.

    Arithon
    I am the Imp of the Perverse - Knowing this won't help you, either.
  • Yeah, pardon my typo. The sentence should read:
    Now drivers for BeOS and other platforms will spring up soon.

    -jwb

  • Read his message again. He clearly meant to type 'no doubt drivers for...' but failed due to Evil Alien Mind Rays or some such thing.. :-)

    Daniel
  • This absolutely rocks!

    But, one thing I ask, how close is Q3test to being playable on TNT hardware under linux now?
  • I do not think his post was off-topic. And even if it was, there are many posts that are a lot more off-topic than his. Why don't you go bother them.
  • The web site says to mail linux@nvidia.com [mailto] -- I believe his personal address is dschmenk@nvidia.com [mailto].

    I agree 100%; he deserves a lot of credit for this work!


    --

  • Here's one way you can provide feedback to Nvidia: see that little warranty card that came with the video card? Fill it in, and send it in.

    I'm the type that almost never fills in the manufacturers' warranty cards. But when I dropped a TNT card into this box, a few months ago, I made a note to fill out the warranty card. Under "Operating Systems" I checked off "Other" and wrote in "Linux". Then, under "reason for purchase", I checked off "Other" again, and wrote "Linux compatibility".

    It's absolutely true that the warranty cards are really used for marketing, more than anything else. But in this case this is precisely what you want the salesdroids to know: that Linux is selling these cards. My warranty card was postage-paid, that tells you right there that the video card manufacturers are very much interested in the their customers demographical information, and warranty cards are the primary source of information that they go with.

    ... And I'll be dropping a second warranty card into the mail this weekend, after I upgrade another workstation with a new motherboard, and a TNT card.

    Good job, Nvidia.

  • Not really (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    3d sound cards actually have much more proprietary stuff in the API than graphics cards. The 3d sound algorithms are much less mature, and vary much more than the essentially identical stuff 3d graphics cards do. They also rely on a much greater mixture of software/hardware rendering. They have a bit more to defend than nVidia.

    Having said that, I will never buy a Creative product until they open up specs. I also guide the purchasing decisions of 4 or 5 other people, and to some extent, my group at work, who will never buy Creative products until they're more open.
  • Lets hope other 3D card makers folow suit. Maybe we can start seeing more games for linux (John Carmack is our friend).
  • Very cool. Kudos Dave. I like the bit of anti-Microsoft sentiment in the FAQ.
  • As far as public forum goes, there were
    essentially two comments made in all the
    threads: 1. Yippee and 2. Buy TNT2 to show
    that Linux brings money. Bruce has posted
    the third relevant comment, namely: let's
    nudge other hw makers to release either
    OS drivers or specs. A relevant thought can
    hardly be inappropriate, especially since
    many companies' employees (although not the
    ones that matter, namely the suits) do read /.
    Also, personally, BP's mistakes whatever they
    may have been, have not yet hurt me, while his
    efforts were somewhat beneficial. That doesn't
    mean I agree with the OSS definition or like
    the "join then quit" approach to community
    leadership, but I do not understand your
    condescending tone, or your criticisms.
  • ICD stands for Installable Client Driver. Basically, Microsoft's opengl32.dll provides a full software path and is what all apps are linked against, but if an ICD is installed the MS dll switches over to the ICD, which provides accelerated rendering for whatever chipset you have installed.

    People emphasize ICD because there is also such a thing as an MCD (mini-client driver, I think), which is much easier to write than an ICD since it plugs into an existing framework rather than having to handle the entire OpenGL pipeline itself. These are only available on NT, and MS doesn't seem to support them any more, presumably because they wanted to see GL die a quick death. Since they don't work on 95/98, they aren't really an option for IHVs anymore.
  • Remember the g200-glx dev list. Some people from their will be maintaining it. Go to:
    http://www.on.openprojects.net/glx/
  • However, it seems to be not synching to refresh when screensavers are run at -root, leading to high amounts of flicker -- anyone else seen this?

    Yep, several of us also noticed this and remarked about it in other posts on this topic.

  • Hey, has anyone actually used the glibc setup script? It seems to be broken on line 159! If you've found otherwise, please help!
  • This is definatly the result of our slashdotting
    their phone system a couple weeks back. We showed
    them we want it.


    That's what we gotta do to get what we want, if a
    company sees enough of a customer need they will
    do _whatever_ we want.

    Go Us!!
  • Umm... what app? what resolution? That would make your framerates more meaningful. :-)
  • If you got this thing working on Debian 2.1 please
    tell me what did you do. All I did is install their custom X server from 3.3.3.1 (but the rest of XFree distrib is from 3.3.2 on slink), Debian mesa 3.0 package and run the riva_install script. Everything seems to be in place but I still can't get quake and and xlock to work in GL modes...

  • $$$$$$$ (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think that NVidia just sold a hellofalotta TNT2's.


    Well... at least one... ;P

    Phenym
  • This is so cool!
    Haven't even tried Quakin' yet, but the XScreensaver GL hacks /FLY/!

    Been waiting for this a long time...

    THANKS NVIDIA!

    --Kevin
    Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD-Sparc


    =-=-=-=-=-=
  • Uhh, AGP isn't supported by Linux? What planet have YOU been on? AGP cards work just fine with Linux. AGP's just basically a modified PCI bus, and Linux sees devices on AGP buses just like it does on PCI buses. It may not support textures in system RAM, or 2x/4x modes, but I don't know if that's gonna make that huge a difference at this point.
  • I'm curious why they chose to limit the driver
    to 16 bitplanes. It's not as though the chipset
    has ever been limited to 16BPP in 3D. Is this
    a limitation of DGA? GLX? Mesa?

    I hope this is fixed soon.
  • I had to decide between the TNT and the G200 'bout 2 weeks ago. I bought the G200 cause it had the GLX driver in development, and i figured NVidia's drivers would be a way off..

    FSCK!!!!

    The worst is that i can't palm the g200 over to one of my other pc's or alpha cause they don't have an agp slot... sh1t.

    Anyway, NVidia: Next time i buy a card, it'll be one of yours..

    -Paul.
  • I'm super pleased to hear that they are now supporting Linux... I ended up buying a Voodoo 2 card because at the time 3DFX was the only company with any linux support.

    Now, my next card may very well be a TNT2 :)

    Good job!
  • There's two parts to their OpenGl support under X. One part gets loaded into the server as a module, the other part is a shared library that gets loaded into the application. The shared library then communicates with the X server to get things done.
  • I'm shocked! I logged on from home with the intention of going to Matrox's site to preorder a G400 Max! I'm glad Slashdot is my home page!

    Qestion: has Matrox released the programming specs to the G400(Max)? By all accounts, I hear its an awesome card, especially at higher resolutions.

    Now I'm faced with a dillema: Should I buy the Nvidia Now or wait a couple of weeks(maybe months?) before Matrox formally anounouces what their plans for Linux are? I'm not even taking 3dfx into consideration at this point.....
  • Come on! This is slashdot. There is no need to condem people who post based on technicalities. In fact, Bruce's post was an extension of the topic and is perfectly legal, even with your comment patrol.

    This is slashdot. People have the right to express their opinions. And it is common courtesy not condem people for doing that.

    --

  • I really like my Viper V550 TNT (despite the heat issues), I'm glad I don't have to supplement it with a V2 or exchange it for a V3 after all.

    I feel kind of bad though, I wrote nVidia several...creatively worded... emails about this in the past month, tongue-lashing them for their sloth and lack of vision on this issue (Linux OpenGL ICD). *Poof*, all of a sudden, here the drivers are. They were probably cooking these up for a while. Oh well, I'm sure they'll forgive me when I buy an NV10 this Fall.

  • Re:Huh? (Score:1)

    by demon ( 1039 )
    Whine, whine. You sound like a spoiled child. If you think it's so irrelevant then WHY are you bothering to read it? And on top of that, why e-mail Rob, bothering him with one MORE unnecessary gripe? Get over it already.
  • >Creative Labs, Diamond... one's head spins..
    >Are they all the same?

    No. They are not extremely different, but they have taken quite different directions. Some developers overclock the TNT chip to get the fastest card, others have advanced control panels.

    Check out
    http://www.firingsquad.com/guides/tnt2buyers/def ault.asp
    http://www.sharkyextreme.com/
    for the latest on the TNT2 cards.

    >I don't have an AGP slot.. are there any PCI
    >Riva TNT cards?

    Yes.
  • Actually the TNT/TNT2 has hardware bumpmapping and the Q3a win32 test shows it off most gratuitously. Why wait for the G400 when the TNT2 has everything now, and is hellafast
  • Heh, acutaly 3dfx drivers suck on windows to. they *Still* don't have a full working ICD, and there users are having tons of trouble getting the q3a test to work. to top it off. They've been trying to get people to write games in glide, by making terrible OGL and even d3d drivers, and now its backfiring.
    ---------------
    Chad Okere
  • The XFree86 maintainer for debian, Branden Robinson, builds X on my box. On occasion, I have helped him out with different parts of the system, and I have designed the current debian side of the build system(automatic applying of patches).

    The nvidia patch is waiting in the queue. The so called vmware patch been in potato's X since -4.

  • This is great. Although I bought a Voodoo3, I'm still cheering NVidia and Matrox on. Kudos!

    Hopefully, with all this new 3D hardware support, things like Blender will start exploiting that hardware, instead of just games. Don't get me wrong, 'cause I'm loving Q3, too :)

  • Get a TNT2 when the drivers are finalized your image quality will be greatly superior to that of a voodoo2 err I mean 3. Sure you'll lack maybe all of 5 fps out of 65 but that really depends on which type of voodoo3 you got.. just make sure to get a TNT2 Ultra.
  • Dear SIGSEGV,

    When one hardware manufacturer makes a brave decision, I think it's fair to nudge another hardware manufacturer, pointing and saying "see!".

    Sure, I have a soapbox and I am rarely off of it. Somehow, by some incredible miracle, big companies are listening. I wish I could tell you about the mega-corporations I've been working with on free software licensing this week. You'll find out eventually.

    I think I'm still doing the community some good. I hope you don't mind too much if I continue.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Other that X's occasionally shitty video performance (at least on my machine), I see no reason my Linux couldn't do this. Copying from a CD takes very little CPU, neither does playing an mp3, so as long as xanim can keep up you should be good to go.
  • I'm guessing that the previous release of the source for their 2D driver would be more germaine. The linux kernel framebuffer doesn't deal with 3D AFAIK.

    But, this release contains some 2D enhancements, so at least some of this would be useful.
  • Nvidia released for 'all' _CURRENT_ chipsets. Those of us who have older hardware are still out of luck. How about Nvidia release source for the older drivers, like the NV1??? That card died a fast death... and it was a nice little (slow) card with built in wavetable and more... the existing X drivers would surely benefit from open sourcing the full specs.
  • YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

    I have a TNT (not II) and I had just about given up hope on any good drivers. I love everything about my linux computer except the x server which is unresponsive at times and could be faster. I wanted be part of the solution, so I emailed the XFree86 project asking how I could help with the TNT support, and they told me I couldn't because there weren't any available specs. Now there are!
    YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!YEEEEHHHHHAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWW

    You have no idea how much that just made my day. THANK YOU NVIDIA. You have at least one new loyal customer.

  • Also note this news fro XFree86 (Score:4)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Wednesday June 02, 1999 @01:06PM (#1869655)
    This is wonderful news that a first rate hardware vendor has open-sourced the drivers for their flagship product. No drivers for BeOS and other plaforms will spring up soon.

    A related piece of good news for the Linux 3D community is the news from XFree86 that a pre-4.0 build will be available in July 1999. Check it out over at xfree86.org [xfree86.org].

    -jwb

  • I was just about to get a Voodoo3 cause 3dfx has given specs to a developer for 3D support.

    Now that the TNT2 is open source, I am quuickly changing my mind.

    M$ must be scared as more harware and software support keep appearing.
  • any language or OS can do what any other language or OS can do . . . it is a fundamental point of computer science. You can write a lisp parser in java and vice versa, or emulate any OS under any other one.

    Why one lang or OS is preferred over another is usually comes down to the model it uses and efficiencies or utility gained from that model.

    Doze, Linux, BeOs can all do what the other does.

    Like I said, I wouldn't use BeOS as a webserver. It fully rocks for multimedia (esp video). Why cobble something together in unix (where X is actually introducing inefficiencies, in some regards doze is better because is the api is close to the kernal).

    My point was that linux and beos can work nicely together. X into the server from beos, do multimedia apps on a system designed for it, serve webpages and ip traffic from a system designed for it.

    beos is pretty close to posix compliant (I use the beos shell just like a unix shell).

    Unix is optimized for multiple users, BeoS is optimized for single user. You work it out.
  • what's an ICD? i've seen this bandied about on various hardware sites, but never explained.

    Whatever it is, i doubt there could be such a thing as a /linux/ opengl icd. XFree86 X server GLX plugin maybe?

    :)
  • Thats what I meant, system textures, and all that good stuff. I know nothing about it. I guess it is good for something. I wanted to know if it was just some buzzword, or something really useful when it is "fully" supported.
  • Bruce Peren's post was on-topic. The topic was: NVidia releases linux drivers. Any response of the form "well, when is everybody else going to do that, and not just for video cards" is most certainly on topic - there is nothing grey about it.
    --
  • Everyone is saying cool. Did anyone try them? They suck(excuse my language)I just installed the libc5 versions on my STB Velocity 128 and it is the same buggy drivers they had before. Green console screen when quitting, screen placement way out of sync and the contrast set to double of normal. I put the excellent 3.3.2.3 SVGA server back. It works fine. What happened since then?

  • Re:Which one to get? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    With a P2-300 you're better off with a TNT. A TNT2 will only buy you a small increase in performance, in Q3 test anyway. Check out http://idsoftware.com/bwh/benchmarks.html
  • depends what ya doin, and what ya brainspace can handle, I spose . . .

    I have mucked around with the draco as well, and that is nice too . . .

    flexibility is power
  • Bruce's post isn't nearly as offtopic as your post about how offtopic he is (and by induction, this one).

  • Doomy, you'll probably never read this, as there have been a dozen new stories posted.. but I don't believe Bruce's post was worthy of a 5 rating. It was Bruce that posted it, that's why he got a 5. If I had posted it.. it might have gotten as high as a 2. It was off topic. End of story.

    And if I really wanted to "take stabs at bruce", as you've so subtly put it, I'd attack him for being childish about the open source trademarking infighting between him and ESR. Okay? There's plenty of flame bait to go around.

    I'd also like to point out that contrary to all the flak I've taken in this thread.. it isn't dead for a reason. Let that eat away at you for abit, 'cuz like it or not people it's the truth.



    --
  • Glad I held out on upgrading the Rendition card.

    Anyway, do the TNT2 cards perform well on older p2 processors, like a p2-300? I heard they kinda suck on them? Will they be better than a plain tnt or Voodoo2? And will the cheapo 16mb cards max out my processor, or could a tnt2-ultra help?

    Also, how does the fact that AGP isn't supported by linux effect these cards performance?

    Also again, anyone wanna post a screenshot? Just to see how the visual quality is on Mesa.
  • No(w) drivers for BeOS and other plaforms will spring up soon.



    Actually, go to the page and you will be pleasantly surprised. :-) Linux is not the only non-Win32 platform to get support.

  • Open source 3D drivers for today's cutting-edge video chipsets? I reserve the right to be excited. I understand that it's preliminary. That doesn't make me less excited. :-)
  • You should see roughly 15 fps on a 200MHz CPU, up to roughly 20-25 fps on a 400+MHz CPU.
  • I'm going to have to do a reality-check and see who else feels the way you do... but not here on Slashdot, please, folks. If you have to, email me at bruce@va.debian.org .

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Well, it was going to be either the Diamond TNT2 or the Voodoo 3 3000 this weekend, looks like nVidia made up my mind for me. :)
  • Seesh, you remind me of myself a few months back. Be this, Be that, Been! aarghl! :) -adnans

  • Q3A does support DirectX, just not Direct3D. Q3A will use DirectDraw and DirectSound if available, and other parts of DirectX also.

    There are many API's in DirectX, some good, some bad.

  • Yeah, I guess I worded that poorly. I know the fb doesn't do 3D... I understood that there was a lot more 2D stuff, too, though. I haven't looked at the source or anything.
    Ethan

  • The G200 is still a great 2D card, and hopefully it'll have a decent XFree86 4.0 3D driver, too.

    Then again, the TNT2 is gonna kick total butt.

  • Running something like Quake2 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm a bit confused as to how these "drivers" work. Are they distributing their own X server (source or binary, whatever) for the TNT/TNT2? I think i just read the "mesa libs are built-in to the X server". How would quake2 use these then? I'm a bit confused on how the drivers fit together in the end - could someone explain? I couldn't piece it together from what they had on their page.

    Speaking of Quake, how would run Quake3? Does it run on my Voodoo1 through XFree86 (the newest version, whatever) and Glide/Mesa, or are there larger forces at work here?
  • About the AGP: that's Intel's fault, not nVidia's. Intel won't release the specs for the GART interface on their chipsets. The other chipset manufacturers will, but that's just for Super7 chipsets, which is a minority of the market, making it more difficult to get something working.
  • While I agree that this was an interesting and relevant comment, and it's always nice to hear what the "star personalities" of the Linux world have to say... it's weird that this post got immediately moderated up to 5. The content of a post is (usually) more important than who wrote it.

    --

  • I logged on this evening and checked my mail and found that the V3 I ordered 2 days ago was out of order. As a result, the order was cancelled. I then visit Slashdot and see this. Must be my lucky day...
  • Yes, sproingies looks really cool, but on my 16MB TNT2 (Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor), I can't run it in full-screen mode (it's *extremely* flickery). Has anyone else seen this problem? -Jake
  • If the frame rates on this thing are in the ballpark with the Voodoo 3 3000 (and last I heard they weren't much slower, even with 32 bit rendering on), I'm getting one. I'm worried about performance on my K6II, though - all the benchmarks I've seen show 3dfx cards performing almost evenly with Celerons at the same clock speed, while TNT/TNT2 performance falls off dramatically.

    I know a couple other people whose only gripe with the TNT2 was the lack of Linux support - I expect their minds are made up solidly now.
  • Got a Creative TNT. Should still last me until 2001.
  • XF4.0 will include our (Precision Insight) direct rendering infrastructure. One of the important issues for good 3D performance is getting a fast path to the hardware. Direct rendering provides that structure.

    When the FAQ says that the performance isn't great, it is because they have to use GLX and go through the X server to do their 3D rendering. There's some significant work to connect up a new driver to the DRI, but the nVidia drivers appear to be well suited to the PI DRI.

    Once that's done the performance will improve. Beyond that there's undoubtedly other optimizations that will be needed, but it'll be a great start.

    People seem to be worried about in a window rendering versus full screen. That's really a non issue. It is true that GLX implies rendering is in a window, but if the window is the same size as the screen, then there isn't really a difference. It should be possible for the driver to detect this case and do page flipping instead of copying and get the performance improvement.

    - |Daryll

  • This is great news. I purchased a TNT a few months ago because it was the best and there were signs of linux drivers. Then nVidia pulled the source back. The public spoke and full drivers are available now! I knew nVidia would kickass.

    Brian
  • I have a Debian 2.1, kernel 2.2.6, glibc, Xfree86 3.3.2 with the new NVIDIA 3.3.3.1 server.

    I found that Q3 worked acceptably at 800x600 resolution but only in a window. It looks great too, even at 16bpp. All the OpenGL features, such as textures on jump pods, portals, marks on walls etc. work correctly.

    To get a pleasant game experience I added an 800x600 mode to my X server, switch to that with CTRL ALT +, and carefully scroll the view to match the window before entering the arena, while I still have use of the mouse.

    This was a bit of a mess to set up for debian. First, converting the .rpm to a .deb and then installing it doesn't work because the files end up in /usr/local/games and it seems to need write access to the game directory to write a config file. Better to convert to .tgz (with "alien") and unpack in your home directory. Next, it tried to start in full screen mode and failed, causing the game graphics to appear in an otherwise garbled screen. It doesn't seen able to exit this mode so I had to kill the X server several times to get it working. After much frobbing I eventually managed to convince it to run in a window and save the configuration file. No problems after that. My advice is, run once until it saves a config file and then edit the file to set the "in window" option.

    Best of luck
    Pavlos Papageorgiou
    pavlos@please.avoid.spam.voxar.com
  • This is fan-bloody-tastic. I wanted to go Riva instead of Voodoo, because I actually care a lot more about image quality (32bpp) than a couple more frames/sec.

    I thought I'd be stuck with a v3 (16bpp) solution. Now thank god we have the support of NVidia. What I can't believe is that they released _source_ and binary drivers... that's incredibly good. That means that it won't take long for the drivers to be optimised and adapted to XF864.0.

    Well you got my money NVidia, thanks guys... we _really_ appreciate it. You made my day. A lot of us want to ditch windoze even as a gaming platform asap and this sort of support really helps us do that.

    Cheers

    Stor
  • Cool! This thing actually works... but I'm only getting ~13fps on my K6-2 300 with TNT. According to q2's GL renderer, the multitexture extension ins't implemented. Has anyone else checked this?

  • Argh, I just ordered a new video card. I wanted a TNT2, but I went with a Matrox card because I mostly need 2d graphics and XFree86 supports the G200 well. If I'd only known this a week ago, I would have bought a TNT2 instead. Oh well, next time!
  • Creative is an OEM of Nvidia chip sets. Creative, nothing in your sound cards can possibly be as proprietary as Nvidia's 3D chip. Let's please have real Open Source drivers for all of your sound cards, and hardware documentation on the web. Lead the pack, don't be a reluctant follower.

    Thanks

    Bruce Perens

  • "The AMD K6 (at least the ones without 3DNow!) was never designed to be a games machine. In fact, getting a Pentium of a _lower_ chip speed will often help you. But of course, other things (remember the K6 series has been optimized for business applications, just like the Cyrixes) will be slower."

    Pentiums were never "designed to be a games machine" either.

    Nothing wrong with the AMD chips. However many games are optimized for the way the Pentium FPU works, which hurts performance on non-Intel.

    AMD would have to *exactly* clone the Intel FPU to take advantage of the same optimizations, which they cannot do.

    The 3DNow! instructions were an attempt at an end-run around this business problem.

    Richard


  • Have you actually tried out the latest G200 glx drivers? I did a few days back, and was very impressed. It ran quake 2 very smoothly at 640x480 (the X server was running with a 16-bit visual). I tried out q3test, and after turning down the texture detail (the game still looked very good), it also ran smoothly (same res/depth).

    The best thing is that this driver will get better and faster. From what I hear, they are working on something that may allow them to use the WARP engine, which should give a good speed up. Also there are many places where the driver can be optimised.

    Note that this is a beta driver, and does have bugs, and a few memory leaks (you may want to restart your X server after a few games of quake).

    I am not saying that other cards will not give better performance, but the G200 gives great 2D performance, and gives fairly good 3D performance, and looks like it will improve.

    If you want more information about the G200 glx drivers, go to http://www.on.openprojects.net/glx/
  • The FAQ on their site promises rpms on metalab.unc.edu for the XF86_SVGA server and the appropriate libs...guess what, they're not there, even when you allow for the fact they garbled the pathname of the directory.

    :o(
    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • I see the same thing on a 8MB Riva 128 ZX.

  • Re:help: return my 3dfx? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Voodoo3 will generally get MORE FPS than any NVIDIA board, but Voodoo3 also renders in 16bit which looks like shit and is the reason its
    faster.

    TNT/2/U renders 32bit. Looks FAR better. But runs
    slower.. TNT2Ultra is your best choice. Fast 2D, Fast 3D (not quite as fast as V3, but looks better).

    If you have a SLOW CPU, IE : Pentium 233MMX get a Voodoo3, slow systems are not good on TNT boards.

    Werd
  • Just my preliminary /timerefresh immediatly after starting the first board (yeah yeah, lame I know):
    800x600 with all visual options on: 27FPS.

    keep in mind, it is VERY unoptimized, the two worst offender is that all rendering happening in the Xserver's context, which means all that data has to be pumped through a pipe! No AGP texturing doesn't help either. Now for a 100% unscientific "test" morph3d screensaver looks about 4 times faster under linux with this driver than under windows with nvidia's detonator drivers (no textures to stuff through the pipe). I can hardly wait till Precision Insight works their magic.

    All in all, a very solid alpha driver, works great (except for q3test) and speed will only improve with time.

  • Excellent move nVidia! (Score:4)

    by Caballero ( 11938 ) <daryll.daryll@net> on Wednesday June 02, 1999 @12:49PM (#1869760) Homepage
    Dave Schmenk of nVidia deserves a lot of credit for pulling this off.

    Hopefully this will be a good example for other hardware vendors.

    We're moving rapidly towards making Linux into a good 3D workstation!

    - |Daryll

  • This will give them a strategic advantage over 3dfx - the TNT drivers will be preferred over 3dfx on linux, which means nVidia will have a larger share of the market on linux.

    3dfx should realize this, and if they're smart, the rest of the industry will shortly follow suit, and we'll have open sourced drivers for most (all?) 3D products. My hats are off to them for creating an excellent product, and for letting us tinker with it. I'm sure this will only accellerate 3D uses with linux (GAMES!) and it's acceptance into mainstream.

    Thanks guys!!



    --
  • I'm sure that requests from the Linux community had a lot to do with the release of these drivers, but give them some credit - they've been working on these for more than 2 weeks. Read the FAQ - Dave said there are 10 man YEARS in the windows version of the drivers. These things don't fall together overnight. Linux users can get pretty impatient while they wait for hardware support, but it's important to refrain from shouting "(hardware vendor here) SUCKS!" if you mail them and you don't have drivers within 2 weeks.

    NVIDIA did a good thing here - if you mailed them requesting the drivers, make sure you mail them and let them know how much you support their action.
  • This is slashdot. People have the right to express their opinions. And it is common courtesy not condem people for doing that.

    Apparently the people reading this thread are evenly split on the issue, if the fluxuations in the original post's score is any indicator. It's a grey area in the moderator guidelines, and it's obviously been unearthed in this thread. I'll e-mail cmdr taco about this... hopefully we'll have the boundaries for "on topic" and "off topic" more clearly defined.

    --
  • When _you_ develop and release software, _you_ can choose the packaging format.

    Don't bitch about someone else's choice, especially when they are giving their work away for free. You should be grateful that someone has done it at all.
  • Hey, don't get TOO excited. The drivers aren't 100% optimized (and no AGP texturing...boo) so, according to the FAQ, you can't run Quake3 with them although Quake2 should work fun. Still, it's a good start, and hopefully when (if) XFree84 4 comes out, I'll be able to play Q3 with a TNT2...yum.

    doozy

  • Re:go away Crow (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...if people werent so stupid I wouldnt have to be though.

    Blasting stupid people is an exercise in futility; chill out and enjoy life, instead of alienating people from your project.

    Besides, most people aren't stupid, they're just ignorant, as we all are in one area or another.

  • The older RIVA and RIVA ZX cards were limited to 16bpp in order to get 3d acceleration(same as the Voodoo).

    Now there may be driver issues that limit TNT and TNT2, but I do know that Windows drivers for TNT and TNT2 support 32bpp acceleration...

    I guess you have to wait for a response from a Linux TNT user...


    -AS
  • > When one hardware manufacturer makes a brave decision, I think it's fair to nudge another hardware manufacturer, pointing and saying "see!".

    Yes, but this is a public forum. What's worse, there are many hundreds of comments posted each day. When people click on the [comments] button, they want to read more about that topic. In this case, it's nVidia o-sourcing their drivers, not creative's lack of doing so. I think it's inappropriate to get up on the soapbox to point that out.. and it's also an ambush: Creative employees wouldn't likely be reading this thread. If you want to send those hw manufacturers a message - send it right to the CTO and cc it to marketing. Better yet, print it out, and snail-mail it to Creative's corporate HQ.

    Sure, I have a soapbox and I am rarely off of it. Somehow, by some incredible miracle, big companies are listening. I wish I could tell you about the mega-corporations I've been working with on free software licensing this week. You'll find out eventually.

    If your posts to license-discuss are any indicator.. I suspected as much. Post something to slashdot about it when you have something. I look forward to reading it. And that post would probably be an appropriate forum to mention which companies aren't "with it". Maybe throwing up a list at opensource.org of a "what's happening" nature would be a Good Thing too.

    I think I'm still doing the community some good. I hope you don't mind too much if I continue.

    Your contributions have been enormous. Of course, your mistakes have been equally monumental! :) Go right on fighting. Contrary to what many slashdotters may think, the odds are still very much against us. We can use all the help we can get.



    --
  • This is great for any linux user who has a 3D card. 3dfx released binary only drivers, Matrox witholds information for programming the triangle setup engine (WARP). The consumer 3D market is so competitive, now that Nvidia has done it, the others will be forced to follow suit, so they are not percieved as having inferior linux support.
    Its good to see that the linux "market" has grown to the point that companies are writing drivers themselves. Here's to a open sourced linux driver on every hardware vendor's web page!

    It doesn't seem to run quake3 for me yet, but quake2 runs and looks great (still a little slow, hopefully Precision Insight will come through for us soon). The kicker? you HAVE to see sproingies at 1600x1200 flying by! Running quake2 and sproingies both in a window and getting good framerate out of both is cool too.

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As you will see, I told them, in no uncertain terms, to see Figure one. -- Dave "First Strike" Pare

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