Games doesent work in Fedora test 3

Mike A. Harris mharris at redhat.com
Wed Oct 22 17:50:30 UTC 2003


On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Steve Bergman wrote:

>I suffered with the open source radeon drivers for my Radeon QD for over
>a year, experiencing periodic lock ups when switching between X and
>VC's, and living with inferior speed, inferior 3D video quality, and
>unsupported hardware features.  Not to mention that ATI had come out
>with the 8000 series, and then the 9000 series, totally unsupported by
>the open source driver, and that driver still didn't even fully support
>the original radeon.  I finally broke down and got a geforce2 and later
>replaced that with a geforce 4 MX440. (Oh, the shame!  It's a bit like
>using the One Ring, I suppose...)
>
>Happily, I now like my Radeon 9100 better than the G4MX440.
>
>I notice that sometime between the release of severn 1 and the present,
>the driver performance seems to have improved siginificantly.  I think
>Fedeora is using a later driver than standard XFree 4.3?

Indeed.  Red Hat XFree86 now includes new OpenGL optimizations 
developed by Jakub Jelinek which dramatically reduce the number 
of relocations that are needed during application startup 
relocation processing.  This also provides performance benefits 
during runtime due to less indirection.  In addition to that 
Jakub implemented TLS (Thread Local Storage) support for libGL, 
which will provide additional performance benefits as well.  The 
libGL libraries and 3D DRI drivers are now compiled both for 
i386, and also for i686, and both of these variants have TLS 
support.  The proper library and driver to use gets autodetected 
automatically so users don't need to even know about any of this.

The result, is that OpenGL applications should start up much 
faster, and also experience decent performance benefits during 
runtime as well.

Note that these enhancements will only be available for Fedora 
Core 1 and later OS releases, and wont be available in erratum 
releases or recompiles for older OS releases because the 
optimizations require newer gcc, glibc in order to work properly.

This work is also being forward ported to current Mesa 
developmental CVS, so that it can be included in the upstream 
Mesa project sources for the future.

>I can run RTWC with all the stops pulled out, 1280x102, 32 bit,
>everything set to high, extra, "you crazy" (it's a RTCW thing),
>trilinear, etc and performance is good on my AMD XP 2100+/Radeon
>9100 AGP system.  AGP 4X works without flaw on my via chipset.
>
>Like I say, it took a loooong time, but the drivers are now
>prety good.

Indeed.  ;o)


>On the negative side, the (rather hard to find) 9100 is the most
>advanced chipset supported (or the 9200 or old 8500 if you are one of
>the people who feel that those are better boards).

Not quite.  ;o)  The fastest 3D card supported by any open source 
drivers period, is the ATI FireGL 8800, and second to that the 
FireGL 8700.  Both of these cards use the same chipset as the 
Radeon 8500, but much faster.  The FireGL 8x00 hardware is 3D 
supported in Red Hat Linux 9, and later, and should work well.
These boards at one point were well over $1500 USD brand new, but 
you can find them on www.pricewatch.com and other places for 
between $125-200 nowadays as the hardware is getting considered 
older now.  It is still very fast compared to Radeon 
8500/9000/9100/9200 though, although it is only AGP 4x.

So, die hard gamers out there, who also demand open source 
drivers on their systems, should at least investigate the
FireGL 8800, as it is as fast as things get in 4.3.0 currently.  

;o)

Hope this helps.

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat





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