Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

3dfx Glide and DRI Open Sourced

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-hack-on dept.

jazzman45 writes "3dfx has released glide v3 as open source. There's the link to the driver's page. It has support for XF86 v4 and it's DRI structure! I found a link to someone's screenshots of Q3Arena in Linux. "

5 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does this mean we can have Glide with a TNT car by Zalgon+26+McGee · · Score: 3
    Such a beast already exists - Creative reverse engineered Glide for their own TNT cards, and called it Unified.

    It's really just a D3D wrapper, but it may be what forced 3dfx's hand.

    ---

    --

    ---

    Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman

  2. Way cool but... by Fritti · · Score: 3

    While I do appreciate the fact that 3Dfx is making the source available, it isn't the complete Glide library that older applications (such as Quake II) depend on. Rather, it is a subset of the Glide API that allows Mesa and their new OpenGL driver to access the Voodoo3.

    I'd like to see the source for the complete Glide library so that my "old" Voodoo2 can also use Glide3X. But, 3Dfx probably isn't going to release this, and they are equally less likely to update Glide for Linux (at least, they haven't done so in ages - Daryll, any takes on this one?)

    Oh well, I planned to go out and buy another 3D card for Q3Arena anyway...

    --Fritti

  3. Stupid question? by moonboy · · Score: 3

    I don't know much about 3D on Linux (and 3D in general, actually) as I don't play games, but I'm curious. Will this make for more realistic (and/or better) 3D on Linux or do some things deeper in Linux (or X maybe?) need to be reworked? Like I said I haven't played games under Linux, but I've been under the impression that 3D under Linux wasn't spectacular because X wasn't a great platform (design-wise) for games. Just curious. It's one of those instances where I'm saying to myself, "I wonder...", so I thought I'd ask.

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein

    --

    Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
  4. Meta Post of Answers by Caballero · · Score: 5
    There have been so many questions with interrelated answers that I thought I would just send out one big update.

    This is a prerelease of the DRI software for 3dfx. It includes FULL source. Because it is a prerelease we know there are bugs and issues. We're collecting feedback on the newsgroup news://news.3dfx.com/3dfx.linux.glide.

    It works with the Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo3. Early cards will never support it, because they are 3D only cards. It doesn't make sense to do X on them. (The Rush is an exception, but it is the so degenerate that it isn't worth the trouble.)

    The old cards will still work just fine with the old Mesa and Glide. Applications will be linked against Mesa, and if you have an old card it will use Glide2x and be fullscreen. If you have a new card, it will use Mesa+DRI and glide3x and possibly run in a window.

    This is a phased rollout. Right now we're in the "stealth" phase. :-) There will be more materials coming out over time and some more press releases to talk about it. So when you see the press releases you'll know about everything coming out.

    Why do you care about this? This lets you run multiple apps at once in a window. Performance is just about the same as fullscreen was. So, if all you cared about was full screen quake, this doesn't make any difference. If you wanted to run other apps, this is a big win. It is also the first full DRI solution, which should be helpful to other projects.

    This work emphasizes OpenGL. That's why the glide3x defaults to DRI only use. The code to make Glide3x work fullscreen non-DRI is included in the source tree. We want companies to use OpenGL. We realize there's a problem with Glide2x only applications. They won't work in this prerelease. Fixing that correctly means making Glide2x a DRI client. We're working on a solution to do that.

    Yes, it is yet another license. (I had nothing to do with that) If you have specific problems with the license bring them up on the newsgroup. They may get changed.

    What about other distros/OSes? You've got the source, go for it. We're still doing a prerelease. We've got other problems to worry about first.

    All this work was done by Precision Insight and 3dfx.

    I think I've got all the relevant questions. Hopefully this will get moderated up. I'll look for other questions later.

    - |Daryll

  5. How open are these, really? by Elvii · · Score: 3

    Are these open ala Nvidia and Sblive, "Here's some code but no specs", or are the open ala Matrox g200/400, where you actually have specs and can do useful work beyond optimizing what they give you? The article was brief and didn't seem all that clear, imho...

    As I still only have a riva128, matrox's (imho) better open-ness will lead me to get a g200/400 when I do upgrade...

    David

    --
    This sig left intentionally blank.