I agree that everyone should be held to the same standard... However, if his behaviour is criminal, the fact that others did the same to him *does*not*excuse* what he did... (And this post makes no claims as whether what he did is illegal or not).
I guess it might have been more helpful for me to tell you where you can find this:-)
Actually, glxinfo isn't really being used any more... However in the Mesa distribution, there are a directory of demos. One of these demos is called glinfo, and it basically does what glxinfo did: tell you info about your gl libraries.
BTW, you'll need Mesa, since glut and GLU are not distributed with the DRI and XF4.0.
I'm quite familiar with that article, and I still believe it's innacurate. Having used the old 3.3.x driver and the DRI driver, I'm quite positive that the newest DRI driver, from CVS, is faster.
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.
The review you linked to is not very accurate. Instead of using the most recent 3dfx drivers (for the DRI under 4.0), they used the old direct rendering method under 3.3.*
Almost every build of the DRI that I've done from cvs since shortly after the release of 4.0, the 3D drivers have been faster, and higher quality, than the old drivers.
Also bear in mind that there is much more to accelerated 3D than just Quake3.
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
"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.
I don't know about playing xanim on linuxPPC, but on my 500 mhz, AMD K6-2, with 128 megs of RAM, mpeg playback under xanim is really crappy. smpeg is *much* better.
I would wager that you don't have something configured properly... I've been using the DRI on my Voodoo3 for quite a while now and am getting the same performance, in terms of quality and speed, under linux as I am under windows on Q3A.
"In my mind, if all things are equal between 2 products, then having the source to one will make it better."
It doesn't make one any better of a product... It just makes you like the product better (and I do agree with you on that)... However, most people could really care less. So, for most people, open source software isn't, by definition, better than closed source, as the original poster said.
Slashdot Mirror
So because you *may* have made some good points in the past you think you now have the right to post this crap?
Adam
Quote:
"Even though KDE2 and QT2 are free software according to all standards (incl. DFSG)..."
Adam
I ask again:
"Why are any of us sitting in judgement of this kid, or the school, when, quite frankly, 99% of us probably do not have all the facts? "
How much research have you done into this case?
Adam
And what does any of this have to do with my post?
BTW, libel is illegal, even if it's only a civil offense.
Adam
Perhaps what they did was not illegal... Are you aware of all the facts in the case?
Why are any of us sitting in judgement of this kid, or the school, when, quite frankly, 99% of us probably do not have all the facts?
Adam
Once again... Doing something illegal (assuming that's what it was) in response to something illegal, does not make either action legal.
Adam
I agree that everyone should be held to the same standard... However, if his behaviour is criminal, the fact that others did the same to him *does*not*excuse* what he did... (And this post makes no claims as whether what he did is illegal or not).
Adam
I guess it might have been more helpful for me to tell you where you can find this
Actually, glxinfo isn't really being used any more... However in the Mesa distribution, there are a directory of demos. One of these demos is called glinfo, and it basically does what glxinfo did: tell you info about your gl libraries.
BTW, you'll need Mesa, since glut and GLU are not distributed with the DRI and XF4.0.
Adam
6.0 I think.
Adam
I'm quite familiar with that article, and I still believe it's innacurate. Having used the old 3.3.x driver and the DRI driver, I'm quite positive that the newest DRI driver, from CVS, is faster.
Adam
Their intent was to view the message, not spread a virus. Stupidity != intent.
Thank God the judicial system in the US in not run by Slashdotters, otherwise it would be more messed up than it already is.
Adam
I'd suggest you check out:
http://dri.sourceforge.net/DRIuserguide.html
WindowMaker works beautifully on my system under XF4.0.
Adam
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
If you want, you can e-mail me your /var/log/XFree86.0.log file and your /etc/X11/XF86Config file...
I can't guarantee anything (not having an S3 Virge to test it on), but I might be able to help you out.
Adam
S3 Virge cards only have 3D support under 3.3.*
I'd suggest you checkout utah-glx.sourceforge.net for more info.
Adam
The review you linked to is not very accurate. Instead of using the most recent 3dfx drivers (for the DRI under 4.0), they used the old direct rendering method under 3.3.*
Almost every build of the DRI that I've done from cvs since shortly after the release of 4.0, the 3D drivers have been faster, and higher quality, than the old drivers.
Also bear in mind that there is much more to accelerated 3D than just Quake3.
Adam
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
"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.
Wrong... The license changed (with release 3.0) from GPL to something compatible to X's license.
Adam
If they're that close-minded that they won't allow my browser, then yes, I'm not going to view that site.
Adam
I don't know about playing xanim on linuxPPC, but on my 500 mhz, AMD K6-2, with 128 megs of RAM, mpeg playback under xanim is really crappy. smpeg is *much* better.
Adam
I would wager that you don't have something configured properly... I've been using the DRI on my Voodoo3 for quite a while now and am getting the same performance, in terms of quality and speed, under linux as I am under windows on Q3A.
Adam
"In my mind, if all things are equal between 2 products, then having the source to one will make it better."
It doesn't make one any better of a product... It just makes you like the product better (and I do agree with you on that)... However, most people could really care less. So, for most people, open source software isn't, by definition, better than closed source, as the original poster said.
Adam
But the article is about Mac OS X
Adam
PS. Please understand that I'm not trying to be very serious here... Just having some fun.