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Nvidia Releases Xserver and GLX for GeForce 256
rmmeyer writes "Looks like Nvidia has finally released a GLX driver and XFree86 server for their high performance video board, the GeForce 256.
I've been waiting with bated breath for this to come out since Linux support was announced WAY back before the chipset was released. Found the info on Linux Games "
I just ordered a system with GeForce.. without checking linux compatabilies.. good for me then :)
I've been waiting for these drivers before I sunk the cash into an Athlon, 'cause I love Nvidia graphics boards... This'll be my 4th.
looks like i dont want that g400 after all
I grabbed it at first sight ! :)))
.. I love my GL screensaver ... *grin* .. .. when trying to run some GL stuff .. but it's better then nothing :)
:)
Damn
It crashes my X once in a while
can't wait ot get unreal Tournament and Quake Arena on here
kudus to Nvidia
bain
Sanity is a majority vote.
I have been waiting for waht seems like forever for this. Now I just hope it works. Well,, gotta go, time to buy a new GeForce!!!!!
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
...for correct use of the term "bated breath." If I had a nickel for every time I've seen somebody improperly use "baited" there, I'd be richer than Bill Gates.
Don't get too hyped up, these drivers are still very slow and don't nearly take advantage of the card, they are waiting for Xfree4.0 to write some decent drivers, they should have just wrote a fully accelerated GLX driver like the ones in Utah-GLX.
I am so happy they released a new version to match 3.3.5. I had to stop using the nvidia 3.3.3 Xserver when I got my Wacom tablet because thier server didn't support the loadable module properly. I think I might just upgrade my tnt2 to a Geforce after all.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Will that allow me to play Quake3???? Someone please try I don't feel like installing it for nothing.
I've found the TNT2 Ultra to be a VERY fast card for X11; and I am glad to see the GeForce being supported as well. I'll have to see if the server will also work on the Quaddro, their "professional" version.
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
Can someone please post either here or on the Loki Portal Page message-board under drivers/gl? Im eager to get a GeForce!
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
Recent moves by 3DFX, and others to release Open Source drivers will hopefully make XFree86 4.0 much nicer than the 3.x releases in terms of supporting top of the line 3D cards well.
And also efforts of id and others to port games to Linux has helped chip makers come around and provide drivers.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Hmmm. Anyone else besides me wish this were fully backwards compatible with the TNT2 and TNT cards?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As it said, this is not the holy grail DRI X 4.0 implementation yet obviously... and it still can't even take advantage of all of the card because of this. I just tried it out and the GL is slower the utah glx with X 3.3.3.1 ( nVidia's previous dynamic X server ). That was ok because I ditched 3.3.3.1 because licq would crash on a threading problem. So I started this up, but licq crashes even though it's supposedly 3.3.5. I can't work without licq unfortunately.... I'm running the regular 3.3.5 bin from xfree86.org now which is ok but I can't seem to get any of the ttf patches working with it ( i miss 3.3.3.1 only because nvidia's was patched to use ttf ). The new nvidia X bin isn't patched for ttf this time is it?
... glad to see that they got some more funding recently.
X 4.0 is basically the answer to all our 3d needs
rm -rf ~/.signature
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
After reading the FAQ, it appears that TNT and TNT2 support has been improved in this version. To wit, my home machine with a TNT2 only had accelerated support with 15 or 16 bit color. Apparently, this version has improved that to 32 bit color.
We'll see if my Q3 framerate gets above 24, but I'm hopeful. (I'm also glad to see that the licence for the source code is the same as the XFree86 licence!)
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
It appears that the binaries are >1 gb...unless I read that wrong. Is that a little big?
I was waiting impatiently for near SIX months for updated drivers from nVidia for this line of cards only to be let down once again. The improvements made to this set of drivers include 32bpp rendering an texturing improvements. The drivers are still slow and underdeveloped. The blame, so to speak, lies squarely on nVidia's refusal to release any register specs to their cards. They won't release DMA programming information either. John Carmack himself stated that if nVidia released their card specs, the utah glx list could probably hack together quality drivers in a few days. So what do we do? I guess we wait. In the meantime, we still don't have programming information, nor is nVidia likely to release it. What does this mean? I suspect it means that we'll be relying on nVidia for closed-source module addons to XFree for a while, until they become less paranoid about opening up.
Tom (from Tom's Hardware fame) just released a review of this card (DDR & SDR comparison), specs, and how it stacks up to the competition (G400 and MAXX). Worth a look here:
http://www6.tomshardwar e.com/graphic/00q1/000107/index.html
It seems NVidia finally understands that releasing their drivers for other platforms than M$ Windows will make them much more popular.
I've waited about 9 months to get any support for the NVidia Riva 128 chipset on any other platform than Windows NT, because NVidia didn't released any specs on this.
I have no bad word about the chipsets of NVidia, they are fast, not very expensive, and technologically up to date.
After hearing this, I can't say anything else but:
Good work NVidia!
This is a replacement signature.
..the un-affected readers?
I have to ask why another Nvidia card? I've been all kinds of dissapointed by the performance of the cards I've owned and seen. The only one I've bought is a Riva TNT I bought a couple years back. 9 FPS in Nvidia optimized 1024x768 Open GL was not impressive. I recently put a PIII 500 behind it and got up to about 21 FPS with a ton of dropped frames. I added in a pair of VooDoo 2's in SLI and got 60 FPS+ in Glide. If I was gonna buy a Geforce card I wouldn't bother unless I could get a DDR card. This is the only one putting out respectable benchmarks. My money is on 3Dfx. I'll wait for VooDoo 5.
The important question is whether this is free software or not. I can't see anything about its being under the GPL, so one has to wonder.
Show me...
Is there a website out there that is a collection of drivers for Linux for all hardware (similar to www.windrivers.com? It seems that if something isn't supported out of the box, you have to search through alot of message boards to find drivers for the device.
It's great when the company has the driver on their website, but if they don't support Linux, then it gets really tough.
NVIDIA put a lot of thought and effort in their object oriented low level API they use on their drivers... I seriously doubt a quick hack on top of register level specs would provide a great performance benefit and you loose all the benefits of their API. (easy arbitration between different drivers accessing the hardware for instance) I dont doubt some of the developers even on the utah list suffer from the NIH syndrome, so they would want to do as low a level implementation as they could. But IMO its not a good idea. The only problem with the API is that they have not released the source. (well its been run through the preprocessor, still portable but not readable)
Did you use Megahal to generate this or something?
V
Hello,
It seems like they released accelereated 3d drivers not onl gor GeFORCE 256, but also for the rest of their product line. Including Riva 128, Riva 128ZX, TNT/2.
You can fetch these drivers from this link.
--
The Riva TNT driver was buggy, unfinished, incomplete , slow and a pain in a but to get working. Even if you get it to work, you are lucky to get half of the FPS that you get in windows on the same machine. Does Geforce glx suffer from this problem too?
I am new to Linux and I have an Nvidia TNT2 Ultra.. Whenever I run Quake3Arena within X, the screen is all wacked out.. the bottom portion on the top half of my screen, and it runs incredibly slow. I read a FAQ and it said to enable lower resolutions for X.. I thought I did that but it's not helping. Any help?
My system is W95/Linux dual boot, but I have been running W95 exclusively lately. Why? In a word: games. I have several games I enjoy - Diablo (an oldie but a goodie), Homeworld, System Shock II, and of course Quake III and Unreal Tournament. If I had the means to run these games under linux, I would reformat my W95 HD, put the CD in the microwave, and never look back. I would dearly love to run Linux 24/7. But, facts are facts: I can't play most of these games at all under Linux, and those that can work do so slowly. Is there more to life than games? Yes. Do I want to be able to play the games I own at a decent framerate? Yes.
So, when will, say, a GeForce DDR under Linux be able to give me QIII with 60FPS at 1024x768 resolution? Will Xfree86 4.0 do it? Will new Nvidia drivers do it? Will Wine do it? Or should I just get a Voodoo card and be done with it?
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
Is this new? I downloaded and installed Riva TNT X stuff from NVIDIA around Thanksgiving -- the FAQ looks the same, though the download file dates are 01/06/00. Does anyone know what (if anything) has been improved in the last 6 weeks? BTW, using the earlier files, OpenGL (Mesa) hardware acceleration works well under Linux, but is probably only half as fast as under Windows (if that).
AFAICS anyway... so its unlikely to be as fast as windows.
From the FAQ: Q. What is new in the 3D acceleration module? A. The 3D portion of the driver has been in updated to take better advantage of the RIVA TNT/TNT2 products. 3D rendering in 32bpp is now supported and textures are no longer limited to be square powers of 2. Support for NVIDIA GeForce 256 based products has also been added. This is much better then the teaser they gave us in June. With the june driver and X 3.3.3.1 I would get around 14 fps in q3demo1. GLX module and X 3.3.5 gets me around 9. This driver with X 3.3.5 plays nice at 24. It doesn't sound like much, but its still an indirect rendering driver. I can settle with that till X 4.0 and DRI comes around. I'm just tired of nvidia getting a bad rep from the glx-dev folks. And it is much more stable (though opening the register specs, ala 3dfx and matrox would be nicer) then the older driver. But still, I send my thanks. And you should too. Now. Dave
--------
WWGD? (What Would Goku Do?)
From the FAQ:
Q. What is new in the 3D acceleration module?
A. The 3D portion of the driver has been in updated to take better advantage of the RIVA TNT/TNT2 products. 3D rendering in 32bpp is now supported and textures are no longer limited to be square powers of 2. Support for NVIDIA GeForce 256 based products has also been added.
This is much better then the teaser they gave us in June. With the june driver and X 3.3.3.1 I would get around 14 fps in q3demo1. GLX module and X 3.3.5 gets me around 9. This driver with X 3.3.5 plays nice at 24. It doesn't sound like much, but its still an indirect rendering driver. I can settle with that till X 4.0 and DRI comes around. I'm just tired of nvidia getting a bad rep from the glx-dev folks.
And it is much more stable (though opening the register specs, ala 3dfx and matrox would be nicer) then the older driver. But still, I send my thanks. And you should too. Now.
Dave
--------
WWGD? (What Would Goku Do?)
I am the proud owner of both a TNT2 card (agp) and a voodoo3 2000 (pci). I use both of the cards and thanks to the fact that 3dfx has spent time and effort to have their video card work (and work well i might add) with linux, that is the main card that I use in my system. For my money, NVidia makes a better product (the GeForce rules all), but again does not have proper support for their product. So until I can get great (not mediocre) drivers for my TNT2 for linux, I will continue to support companies (3dfx) who do. And 3dfx makes a pretty decent product to boot.
~Jester
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
I have no idea whether nVidia performance is better or worse than anyone else but it seems to me that comparing a single Riva TNT under Open GL to TWO Voodoo 2s in Glide isn't really a good way to run a comparison.
The new ones lock X up solid whenever I run a 3D app. I deleted the old drivers and now they're no longer availiable on nvidias ftp...if anyone can findthem I'd be grateful...thanks.
-W.W.
"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology...
would be cool, so then you could make all those intricate changes to speed it up. Get a life.
Yesah i know nvidia say not to use these drivers wqith quake 3 ... And i know someone who is reading this has tried it anyways ... how doesit work? I'm not gonna be able t leave work for a couple more hours to try it and would liek to know if i should buy a zip disk now and bring them home or just wait till i can get one from home next week
when you see all this great innovation in the intel/linux arena you just cant breathe a sigh of relief that soon IRIX and MIPS will be gone and replaced with linux/intel where the real graphics innovation lies.
all the top 3d production will be done solely on linux/intel by the end of this year. sgi just cant top linux raw power and price/performance.
the geforce is about 10,000 times as fast as the top of the line graphics card from sgi. ive talked to many internal sgi people who say the real work gets done on linux internally at sgi. most cant wait to get rid of irix for good.
bottom line is, sgi does nothing for graphics/3d. the innovation lies with linux. they may have invented opengl, but linux has perfected it.
linux is truly the force driving the internet and innovation.
You're committing a whopper of a gender bender here. You can't in Spanish have *muchos gracias any more than in Italian could you have *molti gracie . You need muchas gracias in Spanish, or in Italian, molte gracie . When the noun is plural and feminine, the adjective that applies to it must be identically inflected. Otherwise it's like saying, ``Johnny and I is going to the store,'' or perhaps like ``I are not silly.'' See the problem?
I built myself an Athlon 500 machine with a GeForce (the highend version) Pro? I had consistent lockups in 3D Mode.
Ended up replacing it with a Voodoo3-3000 and had no more lockups. The Voodoo3-3000, while very nice, is no match for the video quality and speed of the GeForce card.
I'll probably go back to the GeForce card if these drivers turn out to be stable. The video quality is just... STUNNING!
Congrats to NVidia for getting on the ball and supporting their users!! Thank you.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Yes I need to ask Why too. The why i want to ask is why do you want to get an Athelon? Just get a Dual Processor P II/III MB. With the price of Dual Processor Mother boards being as low as they are currently, The Dual Processor MB + 2x PII 450Mhz will still be cheaper than Athelon MB + 1x 700 Mhz Athelon. Whats more, you can later upgrade to PIII 800 Mhz processors when the price is right. So when Intel and AMD are batteling out at 1.2 GHz, you will already have a 1.6GHz system, and at probably a quarter the cost!!! You get the speed now, and the upgradability later with dual processor configurations. Intels been trying to thawart people using their processors in the MP configurations, but what they don't realize is that this is their greatest strength. If they catch on to this and start marketing it, it will be the end of AMD (Unless AMD can come out with some really cheap Dual Processor MB's for Athelon.)
Shit! I just got a Voodoo3 3000 for Christmas. Oh well, maybe next year.
on my Creative Labs Riva TNT Quake2 and WolfGL no longer work and in the case of the latter, it locks up X. Quake3 works, maybe even a little better, but the earlier version worked with Q2 and WolfGL as well. Before anyone flames me, I am an experienced Linux user, I had no trouble getting the earlier version to compile and work. I tried the binaries, compiling it myself and I tried several XF86Config changes to include color depth, before I gave up. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow when I have more time.
Linux is already a snappy server and it's becoming a wonderful desktop OS. I use it exclusively for Desktop and as a Server too.
As soon as Enhanced PnP and XFree86 4.0 are a reality, Linux will make new friends on the desktop. It's inevitable!
I think XFree86 4.0 will be the biggest leap for the desktop in quite some time. I'm not holding my breath but... I'm so excited I can hardly wait. (but I will).
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I couldn't play Quake2 under X with the previous release as it was too dark. Under NT, my Creative TNT drivers allow me to boost the gamma setting card (which I do before I play Q2). Before I waste my time trying out the new drivers (which apparently have caused some people to lock up), any word on whether this is still a problem?
Sorry nvidia but I want to drop my TNT2 for a G400 when I have enough money. I prefer to buy a more expensive video card having (almost) full Open specs even if on the paper the card has less power.
Have a look on ATI cards. Few months after saying that they help the OpenSource community, you can find a project for ATI on the Utah-Glx page. I found also a page on TV and Overlay for ATI [XFree team is planning overlay support for Matrox too].
I wanted to have a look on TNT spec to see how to use overlay for my TV card and .. I only found ugly software. I'm feed up of this open-closed specs you offer on your site.
Hey ! Friends ! Drop your nvidia card for a card of a compagny understanding the Open community.
"Hey, if anyone from nvidia is reading, I think it would take all of a single day or two to convert the existing nvidia glx driver to the same pseudo dma / real dma / direct rendering framework we have on the mga driver if some specs were released. It would be nice if we had unified functionality across all three chips, and it would be a major performance boost." http://list s.openprojects.net/pipermail/glx-dev/1999-December /002373.html is the link to the archive page for the message he posted. And he's right about that.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The MGA driver, while it's not yet to the Beta level yet, is quality enough for them to ship the thing with Q3. That's going into a production release of a commercial product for sale. Isn't that quality enough for you? I'd consider it so, myself. It could take us a week or two max to get something in place. Shortly I plan on attempting to demonstrate this with the SiS or Trident chipsets (Yes, I KNOW the things are lame- but there's a lot of poor souls out there that are stuck with them because they're embedded on the motherboard of their cheap PCs.).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
They may have come up with a real gem of an API (For Windows, maybe... I can't imagine an API that magically caters to the requirements of two radically dissimilar OS arch...), the problem with that is that without the specs, we can't fix the API- we're beholden to them for fixes, of which, NVidia has not been forthcoming, claiming they're waiting for the DRI release for the "real thing" from them (C'mon guys, DRI's out already- just make a DRI driver for 3.9.17!).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Once again, a nod of the head to nVidia for releasing open source drivers. What a shame that in the grand scheme of open source, they aren't worth squat. Why is that? Well open source prides itself on Peer Review. And as nVidia *still* has not released specs for public consumption, the drivers cannot be improved.
And again, despite my saying it many times, I urge people to support companies like Matrox who release specs for driver writing. The Utah-GLX driver has made amazing progress and has even outpaced the Windows 9x drivers on some Matrox boards. And the Matrox driver is more feature rich, with AGP and DMA support. And the Matrox driver even has a form of Direct Rendering for XFree 3.3.x. It's not as good as XFree4's DRI, but it's a speed boost.
Support specs over drivers! Drivers are only as good as nVidia makes them.. Specs make better drivers.
I just went out and bougt a pair of VOODOO 3 cards, but haven't been able to get them working yet. (not even sure if they can do projective textures in hardware...but ANY acceleration would be better than nothing...)
If anyone has successfully used projective textures with a TNT2 based card, please let me know how you did it.
Stephen Webb sbwebb0@sac.uky.edu
Right now, I'm running X on an ASUS V6600 GeForce just fine and I never downloaded this server. I think Slashdot forgot to mention that the only thing really new here is the 3D stuff. Oh well, I'm happy. Now my spiffy new GeForce will be able to run 3D stuff in Linux! If only I had some 3D software for Linux...
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
This one just adds 32bpp and Geforce support. It's still as slow their old driver and the Utah-glx driver.
Anyone know when a DRI compatible driver will be released?
why wait for hacked beta drivers in linux? use windows for now and take advantage of those exceptional framerates. Once again I ask for someone to post numbers showing that linux is faster running a 3d game than windows.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
..read the article and follow the link in it. Nvida's driver is only beta for mesa and will depend on xf 4.0. :-(
but Nvida did release the source code for the driver and technical information about it.
why you say sgi is 14 times faster??
i have played quake2 on sgi and it only gets 20fps, i can get 80+fps on TNT/linux.
who is faster now??
Is it me.. or did I imagine this number.. 1646392 KB? They smoking something or did there site developer just think it would be entertaining to slap KB on a file size in bytes? I think the latter since I DL'ed it in a few seconds.. heh I almost had a heart attack when I saw the size..
I'm not saying the VooDoo 2's are the best thing out there. Heck the VooDoo 3 will rock Voo Doo 2's most the time. I've used quite a few Nvidia cards. I said I've only bought a Riva TNT. I've used TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, and Fire GL cards. All of them left me with the "so what" feeling.
As for your Quake performance, I don't doubt that. Read any hardcore review, the OEM's are tailoring the drivers to Quake. Any other Open GL app and the performance isn't near as great. Guess what, I don't play Quake III! Running around in a 10x10 room with rapid fire weapons with 10 other players is dumb. Id Software can never be Tribes, no matter how hard they try.....
Don't feel bad, voodoo3 works very well under linux, and 3dfx has pretty good driver support. Both my brother and I have been playing LOTS of quake3 for linux using the experimental DRI and it works great. (The only problem I have had with version 3.9.17 is that my TV card doesn't work, but that should be fixed in a later release).
I don't recall seeing this term misused, what's the common mis-use of it?
The SGI wasn't made just for quake you newbie windows lamer, its meant for real 3d work. I'm sure the engineers at SGI put getting tons of fps in quake2 on their top list of priorities. Do some realtime modeling and calculation with the SGI and watch it wh00p the PC. Ever see the permedia2 chipset or firegl? They both suck at games but work great in programs like 3dsmax.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Has anyone gotten it to work? Everytime I run anything OpenGL it freezes X. Can anyone help please:) Thanks Keith acid@twcny.rr.com
disclaimer: I do not write code, therefor anything that I say may be BS.
Can you reverse-engineer the code to get the specs? If not, they could get a few coders to sign NDAs for the specs, but release the code as OS. I'd think the OS code would satisfy the zealots, while protecting their proprietary specs.
"My opinion may be wrong"
"You ~may~ want to do a backup first" -Rex, 3rd level support.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Why make such a big deal about this ?
The support NVIDIA has made for the riva 128,TNT,
TNT2, Geforce is pathetic. The 3d performance is
horrible and the drivers still use PIO. They have
not released open specs to do serious drivers, have not made a serious driver them selves and the source they have released is impossible to work with.
While the TNT's and Geforce hardware is fastest the G400 and 3dfx blow them away on linux. Why ?
Serious commitment to support linux and totally open specs.
If your gonna buy go 3dfx or Matrox.
okay... just an offtopic comment about something I saw after your name. I don't know *why* the fuck people can't get it through their thick skulls, Slashdot source is available on the slashdot site.
I would post the URL, but if you're that fucking stupid, you might hurt yourself.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I quote: "Every time someone asks me for the source, I delay the release another day." If, say, Apple declared that OSX was open source, and then consistently responded to questions about it's release with this sentence, how quickly would everyone here jump down their throats? But when it's The Great Rob Malda who does it, it's perfectly Ok to claim the source is open, when in fact it simply isn't.
They can do any damn thing they please, but don't claim that slashdot runs on open source software, or that it's creators do any more than pay lip service to other people's open source efforts. The simple fact is, slash is a closed product that maybe, someday, if we wait and hope and pray, Lord Malda will see fit to hand down unto us.
You can disagree with me about whether it should be open, or whether the community has any right to expect the slash crew to practice what they preach, but you cannot argue that slash is currently open source. That's just foolish.
Oh, yeah, and I'm actually not "that fucking stupid." But thanks for caring.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Technically, all that 3Dfx has done AFAIK for Linux 3Dfx support is to port (and then open source) Glide, and to create the /dev/3Dfx driver. They haven't attempted to integrate their code into other existing environs, like X, which is something that NVidia seems to have done (If I'm reading this information correctly) As a result, anything that wants to use the 3Dfx card has to call Glide, which adds ANOTHER level of redundancy. If they had integrated 3Dfx support directly into glx, or Mesa, or whatever, than that would have been nicer. Instead, they supplied us with a proprietary API which you then need to wrap. IMHO this is a Bad Thing. It means that since we can't see what's going on, our undertanding of how the card works and of all its hidden options is limited by what we can see from Glide. Besides which, Glide sucks.
What's more, if memory serves, they didn't write the original Linux version... somebody else did (Daryll Strauss?) and they later took control of it.
disclaimer: opinions contained therein are not neccessarily those of my employer.
First off, as for the idea of reverse engineering the code, you have no way of knowing that EVERY hardware call is made in the provided drivers. Hence, your recreation of the chip specs would be sketchy at best and involve a bootload of unneccesary work. So between the choice of hacking code with specs or trying to guess specs and hack from that..
Also, the problem is less about the NDA, it's about the way that nVidia claims their hardware works. They say that just releasing low level specs isn't as easy as it seems. I don't believe them. (:
BTW, don't waste your cash on a 3dfx card. For reasons I won't go into depth about here (16bpp max 3d rendering, 256x256 texture size, etc) I'm not really arguing your point, but if you've seen the Duke Nukem Forever screen shots, you can't really say that 16bpp and 256x256 textures look bad.
I have a P2 400 overclocked to 448, 128MB RAM with a Creative 16MB TNT. I recently got a hankering to play Half Life again, after an age of not playing it. In 1024*768 I'm easily pulling 30fps.
I cant hope to achieve that performance in Linux, mind you, as the readme that came with the glx drivers states. The drivers are not optimised, they are for developmental purposes only and Linux will only reach the same level of 3D graphics performance when XF86 4.0 with DRI comes out.
Personally I find the lack of 32bit colour on 3Dfx cards to be a crime. At most I have found a TNT to be 2 or 3 fps slower than a Voodoo 2 (which is a 3D card in the same class) in any given game, but it has a vastly improved level of image quality.
Oh, and on a more on-topic note, this is good news indeed. My birthday is just around the corner so I should be picking up a 32MB GeForce DDR. I might get an extra 128MB RAM aswell, just because prices have come back down and you can *never* have enough RAM.
Nick
Nick
There is so much that bothers me in this and succeding posts I don't even know where to start! First. 1. Linux OpenGL support is crap, since on TNT it is done trought GLX and even on Voodoo it is wrappered through Glide. Glide, however, is pure, unadultered direct rendering. So don't fault nVidia for faults in the OS. 2. GeForce whoops anything 3Dfx has so far. Even a TNT2 Ultra will beat V3 3500, especially if you turn up the detail. 16 bit color and 256 X 256 textures just don't cut it. 3. Sure, dual Voodoo 2s beat a TNT, but not by much. In Windows, only by 30% even in quake, and even less in other games. 4. Geforce is about a full 50% faster in quake 3 than any 3Dfx card, and will only get faster in newer games that use T&L 5. Voodoo 5 6000 will put out 1.3 gigapixels, yes but at what cost? 4 chips and 128 megs of RAM. And thas only 32 meg effective since all textures must be stored multiple times for each chip. I don't think they will fix that problem since it seems to be inherent in SLI (Rage Fury MAXX only has 32 meg effective out of the 64 on the board) If you put 4 GeForces together you get 2 gigapixels per second, and the GeForce Pro (which will be out by the time of Voodoo 5) will be even faster, (probably about 70% like TNT 2 was). 6. In Windows (the only OS that has good 3D, yet) nVidia has a full OpenGL ICD while 3Dfx is lopping along with its lame miniGL driver. (I think they might have an Alpha as hell ICD though) I could go on, but I think I have made myself clear.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually, since he is playing Quake, which only gets about a 40% boost with dual, a 700 MHz athlon will be faster. And even more so in non SMP games (which means all except Quake3)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
X: Error in loading shared libraries: undefined symbol: __rawmemchr
It gets better. If I use my good old trusty XFree86 3.3.5 SVGA server instead of the one they provide, even their glx.so GLX acceleration module has missing symbols:
glx.so: /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/glx.so: undefined symbol: __bzero
What were these people thinking?! They didn't even BOTHER to test their servers and modules before releasing them. I certainly hope I'm not the only person to run into this seemingly-important issue!
For what it's worth, my system is pretty-much-clean Debian 2.1 (slink) with libc6 2.0. I'm shocked that binaries this broken got shipped -- how could they even work on other distributions, requiring internal-looking symbols like that?!
I didn't have anything like this problem with their old (slow, pokey, buggy) drivers. NVidia, we really appreciate the effort, but please, please, try testing in the future!
Thankfully, NVidia supplied the source, so hopefully I'll be able to compile it myself and be rid of these nasty symbols. Bonus points for Open Source!
Do you know WHY ATI released specs to the Rage Pro? Cuz no one buys it anymore! It has been replaced by the current generation! Why did Matrox release the G400 drivers? Because matrox is a distant competitor in the consumer 3D market and wanted to do something to get the mindshare up. (BTW. I love the G400MAX) The cold reality is that nVidia is a market leader and thus has no real incentive to try to ride the Linux hype. (BTW. Believe it or not, 3Dfx is nowhere near as popular as nVidia. It may top retail sales charts, but most graphics card buying is done through OEM to smart individuals and system manufacturers. nVidia has a HUGE lead here, particularly OEMs like to be able to trumpet all the advanced features it has. Plus Voodoo 3 is basically the same card as Voodoo 1 so it is in the too old to matter bin.) Lastly, maybe nVidia has a good reason not to give register info. If you hadn't noticed, it give a good look into the cards internal workings, and why should nVidia give its superior technology out? Just get X4 done and make binary drivers work well. BeOS does and in its 3rd year on intel hardware, it already has manufacturers making drivers for it. Not only do manufacturer made drivers increase their quality, more drivers get made for different hardware. If you look at windows, the OS sux, but the drivers are really much better polished than Linux drivers usually are. Getting access to driver sources rarely does any good because A) If you are such a manly kernel hacker that you can beat people whose only job is to write drivers for one particular piece of hardware, you'd be working for them. B) You have to weigh the consequences. For every 1 person who ever hacked his own driver to fix a problem, I bet there are 10,000 who wished they had drivers for their card.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It looks like it wants glibc 2.1. I had a similar problem with an X server from 3Dfx, it apparently wanted glibc 2.0 AND 2.1 on the system...
was i the only one to notice that on the site of NVidia it says that the binary is almost 1.6 gig ?? Of course it is nog, they just put KB in stead of B after their figures...
sjah
mvg,
Kris "dJOEK" Vandecruys
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Try using a Debian distribution not >12 months old.
These drivers work fine with my potato-based system and a TNT2 Ultra
About 10fps faster in Q3A than the old ones...
(still patiently awaiting XFree86 4.0)
Matt
It works fine on my TNT w/ 16mb of memory. It's in fact worked so well I didn't leave Quake2 for 3 hours.
Umm, that's a strange admission to make, but it does hold up compared to the previous release!
HOW IN HELL CAN THIS BE CONSIDERED OFFTOPIC? FUCK IT!!! That's really pissing me off.
something tells me that SGI, HP, and SUN might just object to the statement you made re: Windows and "(the only OS that has good 3D, yet)". ;)