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Voodoo3 Debut
Several folks wrote in to tell us that
3dfx
has announced the Voodoo3 boards. The 2D/3D combo
card can do 8 million triangles per second but has no
32-bit rendering. To bad 3d support under Linux still
sucks. Quake would be smooth. I figure between Mesa and
xig that should change this year. Standard 3d will make
modern games much easier on Linux. I think Diablo 2 is coming
soon... that would be a swell port.
Maybe 'Not well known' was the wrong choice of words. The point I was trying to make was that the VooDoo2 hasn't saturated the market. The same thing happened with Intel. They introduced the Pentium Line, and that exploded. Next came the Pentium II, and almost on the PII's back follows the PIII. Intel should have held off a while till releasing the PIII, becuase the PII isn't that widespread yet. That was my point with the VooDoo2.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I've been looking to build a new machine with an AGP video board. The board I've been looking at is a diamond fire 1000 gl 8mb. Any clues if there is X support for these cards? I like Diamond (I've used a trident card at work and it's just not as fast as the diamonds). I haven't used ATI's much (only on gateway machines at work that comes with ATI rage). I'm not sure if replies are email forwarded to me and I usually don't return to these comments (no time =). Mail me. Spammers click here.
128 or any previous board by ATI will not be a good deal.
ATI use cheap RAMDAC in all of them...so get a Matrox card instead.
If you are using an ATI, tell me this: how come support sucks so bad?
That's like saying Macintosh support for games is good, there just aren't any games released for the OS... Until the hardware is supported under OpenGL/Mesa, and such, there isn't really any 3d support in Linux, is there? At least no hardware 3d...
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Makes it harder to port to other 3d cards (use OpenGL/Mesa)!
Go to www.linuxquake.com I've been playing Quake II on my Voodoo2 under Linux for a few months, works great. Use the lib3dfxgl.so driver, not any of the Mesa ones which slow things down too much.
I'm sorry, but you are flat out wrong. I have consistantly gotten 67 fps in quake2 from windows, and only 37 fps in quake2 under linux on the same machine. If I'm missing out on something, or misunderstood, I apologize. .. I still barely ever boot windows (half-life :)
Later.
SLI (stands for Scan Line Interleaved) isn't any faster than the new Voodoo3... a standard Voodoo2 does 3M textured triangles per second. Two cards in SLI mode would do 6M triangles. However, even a single Voodoo2 is more than fast enough for any current game on the market. If you've got a game that necessitates an SLI setup now, your CPU is probably way too slow. There's really no reason to go SLI if you have the PCI slots... it should be more than fast enough for quite a while.
"...since STB is owned by Diamond."
;)
Perhaps you meant, "owned by 3Dfx"?
--
synaptik
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
What do you mean by the V2 isn't yet all that well known? Even I have one! They're working on the V4 now, though, so that may have more work put into it as you're suggesting.
SGI does OpenGL in X. Even the high end stuff. High end SGI boxen have kick-ass 3D. Ergo, X is not the problem. XFree86 might be, though. But Precision Insight is working on a multipipe rendering system modelled after papers published by SGI, which will AFAIK be released under the X license. That should solve any performance problems in XFree86, I hope.
The guy doing Voodoo linux drivers at the moment doesn't even work for 3dfx, which in some ways I take as a good sign because we don't have to wait till 3dfx decides to allocate a resource to the project.
The other good thing is that the Voodoo 3 is basicly just a very fast Banchee. All the banchee drivers should work with little or no modifications.
I grant the K7 will be fast; 3x is something I have to see to believe.
The cache on chip is 200MHz, I believe. PCI bus is still 33 MHz, and AGP is 66MHz. Memory may go up to 133MHz, but expect 100MHz because that is currently standard.
I don't know that K7 is a hell of a lot cheaper; Cheaper than a comparable P2 Xeon, which retails for 1900$ for a single CPU at 450MHz and 1 mb cache at 450MHz... But not cheaper than a 190$ 450MHz Celeron, or an overclocked dual Celeron300A at 60$ each, running at 450MHz.
The Vortex2 with A3d, like Diamond's MX300, would seem to have better 3d support for games, while the Sound Blaster Live! has much better studio, mixing, and media authoring capabilities.
You go with IBM; I think they are the best in the business.
19" monitor is also feasible.
So total of your system: 700$ per CPU, 300$ for motherboard, 100$ for MX300, 300$ for an IDE IBM, 160$ for 128mb ram, and 600$ for a decent monitor all now. Assuming the 180$ V3 card...
$3400 dollars =) And I really doubt you will outperform the SGI bus, with its UMA between video and system, and its total bypass of AGP entirely. V3 will still rely on a 33MHz PCI bus, or a 66MHz AGP bus, at 32bit, whereas the SGIs gets a direct 3.2gb/s pipeline from memory to video. What is AGP right now? AGP Pro is something like 1gb/s, and right now is something like 500mb/s?
Also, each component in the SGI gets something like a 1.6gb/s pipe to the CPU. I don't see anything match that; its not even shared bandwith, but individual, like audio, net, hard disk, etc.
Of course, its 4000 for a single 350MHz, 128 mb, and some 19" monitor... But I don't think any architecture can beat that combination.
You're also stuck running WinNT4 until SGI sees the lite and ports to Linux
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Keep up the good work. I *would* prefer specs under NDA so that other people could help you but I think mentioning Linux in 3Dfx press releases is a first step. I hope they'll come around by the end of the year and release specs at least on older cards. That seems reasonable, kind of like a modified Ghostscript license
I bought a Voodoo2 card yesterday, and had Quake2 running within an hour of installing it in my box.
You did read the Quake-HOWTO, didn't you? Does the 3DFX test app give you the blue screen? If not, you've set something up wrong...
..yes, XiG is doing their OpenGL port, which will finally support the i740's 3D capabilities. But of course, they're probably gonna put a high price tag on it, even if you already own Accel-X 4.2. :/
Scott Francis[Mechaman]
mechaman@mail.wsu.edu
How about with Mesa? And does anyone know if doing 3D in a window limits the 2D framebuffer depth to 16bpp? That Albert Einstein logo on /. looks pretty bad at 16bpp.
This sounds like a great card:
- Fast 2D Performance
- MPEG/DVD Acceleration
- Killer 3D Acceleration
- Supports LCD flat displays
It seems like this board does everything one could want from a video card, so where's the hidden gotchas?
How far along is XFree support, Mesa support, and fbcon support for this thingy? Any insiders care to comment?
DG
I don't know about you but I'm gonna stick with my TNT card.
some flat panel monitors accept digital signals (not VGA) only. because the card doesn't have to do a D/A (digital -> VGA) conversion, it's faster.
Look at a Quantum 3D Obsidian X-24 if you have around $350 to spend... Best card on the market. Even beats Voodoo3 3000's preformance by many times. It's a single-card Single Line Interleave (a method of doubling rendering speed) PCI card. It's a VERY big card, requires a seperate VGA card for 2D graphics, doesn't support Glide 3 in the Quantum drivers YET (their in developement now but you can use the 3DFX version instead), and is very pricy. More information: http://www.quantum3d.com
Wait till new nVidia board ship, and after 2-3 months after that you will see Vodoo3 being cheap as dirt. Well, in few weeks after that there will be new Vodoo4 board, so you will be always stuck with obsolete hardware!
How come xig's name is everyplace on /. and
Metro Link is never mentioned? Metro is
working on a hardware accelerated OpenGL
implementation and has an early release driver
out there. Whats more, Metro Link supports
XFree86.
On the high-end, the AGP-only Voodoo 3 3500 will run at 183MHz and include 16MB of SGRAM, rather than the SDRAM featured in the other cards. Like the 2500, it will offer TV-out capabilities, a 350-MHz RAMDAC, and a game bundle. In addition, it will feature 3Dfx's proprietary LCDfx technology for supporting digital flat-panel displays.
Ripped straight out of gamecenter.com
Unfortunately, it will be a $200+ solution and still only 16mb onboard, without real AGP DME texturing, and I doubt the DVD acceleration is available under Linux yet... And it is still only 16bit acceleration, of course, if you care.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Without a doubt, I'll get a V3 ...
...
:)
It's a great way to free some slots in the PC too:
1 2D Card + 2 V2 SLI = 1 AGP + 2 PCI or 3 PCI slots, V3 just needs one AGP slot
Well, for me, it _is_ important
The banshee i have is ULTRA FAST, even at 16bit 1600x1280, what more do u want? We just need a damn Xserver for all these new cards, fuking xfree is so slow of there ass, GET SOME people there talking to manufactures directly, no pussyfutting Im sick of waiting 6months for banshee drivers FBCON works, but its slow(er), and that beta/alpha banshee driver is ultra unstable and needs glibc2 etc... sigh..., REVERSE engineer the damn windows drivers, fusion32.vxd or soemthing, how long can 120k take? -CB
I would just like to say thanks, too.
Bandwagon boy (and proud banshee owner)
Maybe someone from 3DFx could clear this up...
TedC
Sucks to be vendor locked, doesn't it? To be held hostage in an open market by one company, whether they realize it or not, whether the market realizes or not...
Wonders how soon Real Soon is, since there is open source 2d for TNT under Linux. How long until 3d?
Sigh.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
"Not well known"?!? You're kidding, right? ;)
It's the top card right now.
--
synaptik
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
"passthrough is dead" is the politically correct answer at the moment unfortunately.
The problem is that many of the popular 2d/3d
PC video boards (like the TNT's and such) are really crappy at 2D.
2D performance is not a given these days...sure most of todays cards are fast enough, but the actualy image quality varies greatly.
At the moment, I'm use a #9 Revolution IV, which is a 2d/3d card (tho the 3d performance is sub-average). 2D on this card is superb: faster than a Matrox G200, with even better quality. Text is super-sharp, even at high resolutions. The TNT boards, by comparison, look blurry and swimmy.
So that's the dilemma...You have to choose between a better-made, more expensive card, and a cheap, lower-quality "gamers" card. I guess the real problem is that PC's only ship with 1 AGP slot, and so few companies are producing PCI video cards
(which is fine for 2d)
Yes, OpenGL has very poor software implimentation across the board from Windows 98 all the way to Solaris. The fact is, OpenGL has a down right slow software rendering engine.
In all fairness however, this is sometimes do to the fact that the software rendering engine is very high quality. Thoose Hexen II people proably forgot to turn off special features like bilinear filtering.
Yes, you can do bilenear filtering in OpenGL just like DirectX, but it is so slow that you can't believe it.
Hey! I have a Voodoo2 board right now. Should I go Voodoo3 or get a price dropping Voodoo2 board and SLI 'em (or whatever its called)? I like to hold onto hardware as long as I can to get my dough out of the thing.
Thanks Mucho
Ron Rangel
i bet thats IDE right?.. there is no such thing as ultra fast IDE (or UDMA). if you want real speed get a Ultra2 SCSI, Segate is coming out with some new Cheetahs 28.8mb/s sustained now That is DAMN! fast..
granted, the 2D performance may be speedy... but comparisons to the "null driver" don't answer the allegation that the cards have blurry 2D output.
WHOAA!!! I WANT ONE. 366 million pixels a second combined with a dual 128 bit internet engine with a 3.2 GB per second transfer rate while the TNT still uses the slow 200-300 million bps AGP 4x interface. WAAA!! Povray and blender will fly! 3dfx also said it should support linux.
MY GAME DREAM MACHINE FOR NEXT MAY includes:
-amd k7 (fpu 3x as fast as a pentium2)
-128 megs of 2oomhz ram for alpha (amd licensed compaqs bus and it will be running at 200 mhz)
-Perhaps a second cpu (amd will support the alpha smp)
-creative labs 3d sound blaster live with the extra 150 watt 4 way speakers so I can hear enemies shooting in 3d.)
-one of those new ultra fast IBM hard drives that are comming out. 15 gb
-19 inch monitor. hay they are getting real cheap.
I may be able to get a system like this for only around 2200 or 2300 becasue the k7 should be a hell of alot cheaper then any intel chip.
THis new vodoo3 and the k7 should even outperform the new sgi workstation because of the new io bus borrwed form alpha and these vodoo chips are alpha so THEY HAVE BEEN CRIPULED BY UP TP 30%. This means that I will be able to play at 85 fps at 1024 768 and with the k7 with the 3dnow enabled , I might around 90 fps!
This just shows linux non gamers, that we (gamers and artists)how nuts the game community like us are. WHOOO NEED MORE SPEED!! (its a gamers thing. you old fashioned nerds wouldn't understand)
I thought of this too. Also I think there's some time before the V3 gets good X-Server support.
:-(
Problems with another V2 are that it takes one more PCI slot and if you have a slow processor, you won't get any benefits of the new card. (300 MHz PII or similar is recommended). My 200 MHz is too slow.
SLI is supported GREAT!
There are three possible reasons why you might want a Voodoo3 instead of a Voodoo2 SLI:
1. You don't have an extra PCI slot
2. You want resolutions higher than 1024x768
3. Your Voodoo2 setup has a shitty pass-thru cable
If none of those apply, go SLI - it's faster.
Dave K
daking at infinet dot com
Posted by IconisT:
Don't even bother with V3, as far as I can tell its just fast, at the cost of features, as opposed to TNT2 which will be fast and have all the features, Permedia3 as well will be pretty decent, I can't say which one will be better, but I don't think Voodoo3 is the way to go, unless you don't have a really nice machine and want speed. If you have a decent computer though, get a card that can handle the speeds AND the graphics, not just resolution but different options like bi-linear filtering, stencil buffering, etc, etc, oh not to mention 32bit color, sheesh, Not sure what 3dfx was thinking with voodoo3, Maybe they know people will buy 3dfx over quality, if only because they don't know what all these features mean. Seriously though, I recommend waiting to see how these new chipsets shake out; Permedia3, TNT2, Voodoo3, etc. I also have a 12MB voodoo2, and I like it, but I see my friend's TNT and wish that I could have the higher res, even though its not quite as fast as my voodoo2, albeit the difference is minimal, ie worth it! Peace.
The wheels turn slow at that 3dfx place, i have the 3dfx development page bookmarked so i can get the latest alpha banshee xserver etc, and this process has been excruciating, dont expect voodoo3 support for a long long time. At least the wheels are turning thought =/
http://glide.xxedgexx.com/status.html
Wasn't there an article a week or so ago about Creative making linux drivers for all of their cards? This might be an indication that I'm going with Creative for my next voodoo card :)
Maybe the rest (Diamond?) will follow Creatives lead.
This probably means that I'll be able to finally pay what the Voodoo2 are worth, not some marked-up price.
...and the time will have come. And the name shall be known... The Kylrathi Viper Clan.
I've been hearing too much idiot talk about 3dfx image quality lately. If you are going to spout feature list to make your point, at least try to mention those that 3dfx doesn't have. The Voodoo1 had bilinear filtering, it's the standard method all cards use in texture mapping. And the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 have stencil buffers.
.25u version of the TNT, so the only improvement will be a 25-50% increase in clock speed. It will still be well short of the V3 in performance.
For now, 32 bit color is a non issue. The TNT runs too slow for gaming at >16 bit. Until cards get significantly faster (ie. not this next generation of V3, TNT2, etc.) nobody is going to be using 32 bit rendering.
The image quality argument is BS anyway. I've got two computers, one with V2 SLI and the other with TNT. Once you learn to adjust the GL lighting settings, the V2 or TNT can be made to look almost exactly like the other. Also, I notice more texture errors and jagged textures rendered at medium-long distance on the TNT. The banded sky in Q2 that everyone uses to bash the V2 in V2 vs. TNT comparisons is easily tweaked out (grab Brett Jacobs' tweak kit).
The early benchmarks of the V3 show that it blows the TNT out of the water by a 2-1 margin in GL games. nVidia's next part is just a
Last but not least, you'll probably never see nVidia support 3D under Linux.
Dave K
daking at infinet dot com
I've seen Conix OpenGL for the Mac, and its software rendering. It's seriously impressive for software rendering. One would almost think it was raycasting from the speed of some demos! This is the product Apple bought and will be making available to MacOS folk at no cost, the concession that got John Carmack on a stage acerbically plugging Macintoshes. Maybe PPC is particularly suited to software OpenGL rendering? If so it'd be every bit as capable in linuxppc...
i'd buy a TNT if there was 3d support in Linux,
hopefully not specific to one implementation, e.g.
what OS I'm running is not interesting, but what
systems could use TNT and support it is interesting...if you support more platforms than
Windows 95, you gain potential markets.
You don't think the higher end Voodoo3s will take off big? That's what everybody said about the 12MB Voodoo2 boards. And people bought those even though there was no performance difference in current games.
Dave K
daking at infinet dot com
The point is that these packages (xig, Mesa, etc) should support the acceleration of Voodoo3. As for OpenGL hardware support in X, it does have its problems, but they're being overcome.
Actually, Conix (the same company that's doing OpenGL for MacOS) is working on an OpenGL plugin for XFree, last time I checked.
Banshee's 2d acceleration was never very good anyway. That's why 3Dfx bought a company that actually knew how to do decent 2D acceleration and had them develop the 2D core for the Voodoo3. As a result, the 2D performance of Voodoo3 is very much improved.
The Banshee and V3 are a common core, so the X server that is out for the VB will work for the V3. It is getting "reasonable" right now. I'm working out a few glitches, but I'm almost ready to call it working.
3D support will take a little more effort, but shouldn't be too bad. The approach will be the same as the Voodoo Rush, but should perform much better as it won't have to stall the graphics to do a page flip like the VR board.
The V3 is faster than a V2 SLI configuration, and it gives you nice 3D in a window. It should be win. The biggest downside is that the 3D is still 16 bit.
For more information on all this see my website:
http://glide.xxedgexx.com in particular the status.html page located there.
The reason the Xi Graphics and Metro Link solutions help is that it gets a lot more boards supported. To do 3D well you really do need a 3D board. Xi supports several.
I'm doing a presentation at Linux World Conference and Expo on the state of 3D for Linux. At that presentation I'll be talking about the state of the free and comercial software. I'll also be presenting some benchmark results on a variety of boards and servers.
After the show is over I plan on putting my results up on my website.
search for linux at this Earl :
http://www.3dfx.com/view_io.asp?ID=20
Hmm... I found it really easy to get working, but I don't have the program anymore. Where can I get the executable? Are shareware Q2 levels available on id's site (if not, I guess could borrow my neigbor's Q2 CD for a while to try to get it working)?
I agree. It is a good product that's been around for a long time and supported Linux early on.
It's already listed on my software page of my website. (http://www.linux3d.org) I expect I'll plug them in the SciVis area in my talk.
ahahha, looser
2 cards use 2 pci slots, thats pathetic
current banshee is GREAT at 2d, and its 3d is way nice as well, so stop livingin 1997
-CB
I still want to choose my 2D card and use
the 3DFx for 3D only... *sigh*
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I think the 3500 hundred can drive CRTs as well.
One thing to keep in mind when pricing flat panels, the stated size represents the active image area, unlike CRTs. The 15" apple display we just bought has the same image area as a Sony Trinitron display and I must say, the image is fantastic. The viewing angles are quite broad, the image as bright and the subsampling is very well done so things look good even below screen resolution.
The price was just over $1000. A bit high, but not a totall killer. In a month or two they should have a 17" for about $1500 with the same active image area of a 19" display.
That depends. Do you need a faster 2D card? Also, the V3 may be able to do OpenGL 3D in a window, which I think would be nice (I have a V2 on a P200MMX).
Doesn't anyone else think it's a bit early to introduce the VooDoo3? The VooDoo2 isn't really all that well known as of yet, so I think 3DFX should have waited and developed 3 a bit more.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I currently have a P-5 200MHz machine (non-MMX). I was planning on buying a Voodoo 2 (Monster 3d II) card for it. Should I buy the Voodoo 2 or wait for the Voodoo 3? Would the Voodoo 3 even run on my machine (I don't have AGP, etc.)?
:)
Yes, I know that the Voodoo 2 would be CPU-limited on my machine. I'm just wondering whether to spend $130 on a Voodoo 2 or wait to spend $160 on a Voodoo 3
Thanks,
Niall
I'm curious if ACs come back to read the responses to their questions... A minor benefit to registration is the ability to track all your posts, and read all the correspinding responses...
Anyway, I think the 3500 would have both LCD and regular monitor support; at that price range it would be ridiculous not to support both. Heck, it comes with TV out, so I assume that all the reviewers feel a standard VGA connector is so standard that they fail to mention it.
VooDoo3 will only support "windowed QuakeGL", and probably most other games, but I don't know about "real GL" yet. Anyone know how far 3dfx has gotten on it's GL drivers, ICD, and such? Right now Quake games and derivatives all rely on a miniGL driver, ie, the driver only contains the calls made by Quake, and no others.
Heh, that makes me wonder if it's possible, on a dual CPU system, whether 2 games of Quake2 in GL are possible in 2 windows...
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
their is a minor benefit to being anonymous ---- you get to be anonymous.
the question is how the voodoo3 compares with other popular 2d cards.
i have a matrox mill2 with 8M, easily upgradable,
and it does everything i need.
is the voodoo3 significanlty better,
or supported as well? (or will it be)
or would sticking with my voodoo2 be best to maintain my current 2d, and wait for a pass-through V3 or the like?
-TK
RTFM!! It has support for Permedia II using the 3DLABS server.
as i understand it, 3dfx is just letting you do it, not really supporting linux themselves.
http://www.linuxquake.com/howto/
When the screen turns black just unplug the monitor from the 3d card and into your regular video card.
How does xig and Mesa solve Linux's 3D speed problems? In the current mess, we already have a free opengl library in Mesa, but it's too slow on X, svgalib doesn't support most chips, and GGI is still in flux.
I understand why OpenGL is a good thing, since a game can be written for both win32 and Linux simultaneously. But wouldn't better support for voodoo chips provide almost the same thing? Or is X still too slow? Doesn't hardware support for opengl still face the limitations for X, or is X somehow changed?
Confusing.
you could always use the tnt in windows however
Hmmm, I hate buying things. Either it's great and you love it, or it sucks and your stuck with it.
My Voodoo 1 was one of the better thing I've ever got though, so maybe V3 is a good idea.
Then again mabye a ATI rage would be the best choice
arrrrrrrrr
Fishy
1. What driver are you using? Use the lib3dfxgl.so driver, not any of the Mesa ones.
/proc/mtrr and you should see the zones for your Voodoo2. If not recompile with MTRR support and get the 3dfx kernel module.
2. Do you have MTRR's enabled? cat
I get 38.5 @640x480 on my ancient Pentium Pro 200 w/ a Voodoo2. 35.8 @800x600. Don't really have Windows anymore, not like it worked in the first place.
All gamers might know, but the money really isn't in the gamer's pockets, are they?
What 3dfx needs is a good enough board with 32bpp color depth and 32mb of memory and good AGP2x/4x support, as well as DVD support
(See ATI Rage128 and TNT2)
For real cash, 3dfx wants to bundle in OEM systems, and attract more for business machines, soho, and sub-1000 machines, since all those are targeted for high volume growth in 1999. It's boards, spec wise, don't live up because of lack of features... S3, Matrox, nVidia, and ATI all have better looking specs, even if they don't dominate in 3d.
Any comments?
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
If you are using windows, ATI Rage 128 might be a good idea... if not, you lose. :(
ATI does not seem very supportive of the idea of supporting 3d under Linux to say the least, heck, they don't even give out information on how to use the I2C bus on the 3d Rage II chip, which is needed to drive the ATI-TV card...
Check out http://www.linux3d.org/. This site is run by Daryll Strauss, who does all the glide ports to Linux...
As far as I know, Voodoo is the only consumer-grade 3D hardware support under Linux. (nVidia only has a 2D X server.) Daryll is also porting to Linux/PPC and Alpha..
However, I don't think SLI is supported under Linux...
I think it's safe to say that Creative won't be selling Voodoo3 cards. STB Systems, Inc. announced 2 months ago that 3Dfx has agreed to purchase them, pending FTC/SEC/shareholder approval.
3Dfx will be selling their own wares, exclusively, in all likelihood.
That said, don't be unduly concerned about Linux drivers. It think someone above already mentioned that 3Dfx has committed resources (contractor, or otherwise,) to accomplish this.
--
synaptik
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
It's actually more complicated than that. There are four things to getting the Banshee/V3 running:
1) An X server. Since people want to do 2D on these things. (Actually the X server provides some other support functions as well). I'm working on this now.
2) Glide. This talks to the hardware. This is just routine code messaging to make it run under Linux. A little assembly that needs to move between MASM and GAS.
3) X Server/Glide Integration. They have to cooperate in talking to the hardware. This is the XFree86-Rush extension slightly modified for the Banshee. Shouldn't take much work.
4)
Good going Commander Taco! It's nice to see leaders in the Linux community perpetation the same old 3D FUD.
Linux's support of 3d is great, there just isn't much hardware supported.
Posted by obituary:
I think that has more to do with Quake II than Linux or Windows. On my system, a 640x480 software rendered timedemo tells me that Windows is about 4-6 FPS faster than Linux. I'm positive this is not the case, however, because *visually* the game runs smoother and appears seamless in Linux. It *feels* much faster than it does when I'm playing under Windows -- I'm sure the benchmarks are misleading.
I get similar results with my Voodoo card as well.
Whatever algorithm Q2 uses to calculate the framerate clearly favours Windows. Let your eyes be the judge... if it's running smoothly, who cares how many FPS its doing?
No problems in windows, use Xglide.dll, it is a wrapper to use glide games under non glide hardware by wrapping glide over DirectX3d
it works
But yes, glide should be GPL, or just use opengl for forks sake wankers
Silly.
Then you would wait forever!
New graphics cards are going to pop up like crazy this year;
ATI's Rage 128, TNT class
TNT2, TNT+ class
VooDoo3 2000, TNT+ class
VooDoo3 3000, SLI class
VooDoo3 3500, SLI+ class
VooDoo3 4000, VooDoo2 killer
S3 Savage4, TNT class
3dLabs Permedia3, TNT class
And probably others from Trident, Matrox, etc.
I don't see any VooDoo3s other than 2000 taking off really big, as most people don't need/want more performance/cost than that.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Wake up! there *IS* hardware 3d support under Linux.. Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 (and soon to be banshee)..
Also, if you are willing to use BETA and Commercial Beta software you also get i740, Permedia 2(+), Glint Delta MX, Number Nine IV, and several others.
I use Vis5d (a SGI developed OGL app) every day with Mesa and a Voodoo2.. The voodoo 2 kinda sucks for what vis5d asks it to do.. But it is quite useable.
Is the 3500 for flat panel displays ONLY? The press release is a bit foggy on this. Would there be any reason why a card made specificly for a flat panel display would recieve such a sizable performance increase (about 12% they claim - 7M tris/sec on the 3000 to 8M tris/sec on the 3500)? Personaly if I'm going to shell out $180 for a new card, I'd rather add in another wad of cash and get the SGRAM model with 8M tris/sec.. but the price of a flat panel display is still out of my budget (I think there's a nice 21" model for only.. $4200)
I'm upgrading from a voodoo 1 that is old enough now that the texture memory is degrading - though this is mostly due to a manufacturing prob i'd imagine (rather fun when the skies turn all purply at random in games) so I'm not really in the game of "keeping my old card around since games dont use the new one yet anyway" - since the voodoo 1 now plays current titles slooowww.
About the windowed 3d.. does this mean that the voodoo 3 now supports "windowed OpenGL" - i.e. will it speed up 3d design progs? Or does it just mean that you can use 1 window with the 3d acceleration?
I was just wondering, actually. I have an 8MB Matrox + a 12MB Voodoo 2 right now. Some other machines I use only go up to 16bpp at a decent resolution, though.