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XFree86 4.0 vs. XFree86 3.3.x
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.
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?
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
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.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
You can also find information comparing driver support between XF86 3.3.x and XF86 4.0 here at the XFree86 website. You'll find that many popular graphics chipsets have yet to be ported to XF86 4.0.
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.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
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
"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.
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.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
> 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..
you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect
Actually, it's the other drivers that are behind
And Mesa happens to be at the heart of the OpenGL implementation in XF4...
whose OpenGL 1.2 implementation is not complete/100% conformant
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...
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"... :-(
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
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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
"The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get." -Robert Smith
Gnome doesn't use Enlightenment anymore, but rather Sawfish which is supposed to fit in better with how E does things... There's an interesting article What's New in Gnome 1.2 on LinuxPower
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.
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
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
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
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?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Nice troll! I'll bite. Lessee, where do I start.
Why don't you do a little research occasionally?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
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,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
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.
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/
--
Marc A. Lepage (aka SEGV)
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Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
-l
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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."
/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.
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
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.
-- DuckWing
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.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
I have little doubt that XF4.0 is going to make games somewhat snappier, but I'd like to see how much.
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.)
-- v --
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.
/etc/X11/gdm-conf and _poof_ I could drag stuff from screen to screen to screen.
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
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.
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
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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?
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
# 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've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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
-- K
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.