Games doesent work in Fedora test 3

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, joe wrote:

>nvidia cards/drivers - and that is not at all helpful, since the
>problems they are seeing are seldom if ever related to any flaws
>in the nvidia drivers, from what I can see.

Quite the opposite.  Nvidia driver related problems are almost 
always due to end user misconfiguration or misinstallation, or 
users using the drivers with a kernel the Nvidia driver does not 
officially support, or some other similar issue or 
incompatibility.  The majority of issues tend to be fixed when 
Nvidia updates their drivers - hint hint.


>error since it only happens in some GUI application :\ Heck,
>these folks just want to find out how to work around the issues
>with a minimum of grief. 

Exactly.  That's the problem.  Bugzilla is not a technical 
support forum.  The proper place for technical support for Nvidia 
driver issues is on Nvidia's web forums.  That is what Nvidia 
themselves have told me directly on several occasions.  They 
*WANT* people to report problems on their web forums, that way 
they can see the problems.  They told me they have a few people 
who read those forums and offer advice, etc., and that when a 
common problem is seen coming up a lot it gets passed on to 
engineers and investigated.

So the absolute best way to get Nvidia related problems 
investigated is to use their web forums.  Also however, one 
should realize that they are not going to support a beta 
operating system.  Traditionally it's a good month or two after 
an OS release before Nvidia or other vendors officially start 
supporting it.  That is IMHO completely reasonable of them to do.


>More often than not, it turns out that someone on the list has
>found a solution and posts it, which fixes the problem for the
>original poster - no kernel debugging needed,

Red Hat engineering is not Red Hat technical support however.  
You might have a problem that is not a bug in any software at 
all, but reporting it in bugzilla is not the proper place, as 
bugzilla is NOT a technical support forum.  Bugzilla is for 
reporting software defects that are in Red Hat OS components, 
etc. so that those components can be investigated and a 
resolution found.

Don't report bugs with Nvidia's binary drivers unless it is 
something very obviously not a problem caused due to the drivers 
- in our eyes, not yours.  If in doubt, reproduce the problem 
using the "nv" driver.  Or in the case of ATI and their binary 
drivers, reproduce the problem with the "radeon" driver, etc..

If a problem isn't video driver related, then it should happen 
with any driver.


>>Do you know of any enterprises who care how well
>>games run on their enterprise desktops?  For most, it's probably a plus
>>if they *don't* run well.
>
>If the games can't run on linux, then it's most likely that no other 
>demanding 3D apps can run either :\

It depends on the nature of the specific problem.  Generally
speaking however, customers running 'demanding' 3D applications
will most likely be using high end 3D hardware of some sort,
either workstation hardware, or even mid to high consumer
hardware, and they're most likely going to be using proprietary
drivers in order to get the most out of their software.  They
should contact their video hardware vendor for support for their
drivers, and if it's commercial software, their 3D software
vendor for support for that software.

Support for this stuff doesn't come for free, it costs money to
staff support people, and software engineers.  The OSS community
of developers out there of course comes for free, and also 
provides free technical support.

Perhaps there is a market out there for people to provide 
email/web/phone technical support for video games and installing 
proprietary or other 3D drivers?  Possibly even a market for 
people to debug/fix video driver installation issues, and debug 
DRI problems in 3D games?

If there isn't a market for that, then there isn't any market for 
Red Hat to spend money doing it either.  If there is a market for 
it, then we perhaps are missing a business opportunity, and 
perhaps someone reading this list will consider starting up "3D 
debuggers Inc" company to fill the market niche we're not 
filling.

;o)


>We certainly agree on that - and nobody can deny that nvidia has
>been very responsive, and worked hard to make their drivers the
>best ones available for linux.

Their paying high end customers expect a high level of 
functionality and support from them, as do any other vendor's.  
They do what they do for their paying high end customers.


>I'm just saying, don't make this a witch hunt, give nvidia users
>the benefit of the doubt unless you have some reason to suspect
>their problem is caused by an nvidia bug.

We do what is best for us.  Nvidia will do what is best for them, 
end users will do what is best for them.


>BTW I'm running fc t3 with nvidia geforce 2, nvidia accelerated
>drivers, and multimedia applications - it's very snappy, solid,
>and I haven't had any problems so far, other than having to
>tweak a few things to get the GL screensavers to use nvidia
>drivers instead of mesa software gl. I will give it the q3a test
>later.

Mesa software GL should be completely uninstalled with --nodeps 
prior to installing Nvidia's proprietary drivers.  Otherwise you 
will get very mixed problems with software trying to use Mesa 
libGL instead of Nvidia libGL.  Since we ship multiple optimized 
versions of libGL now, this will confuse things even greater.




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