On Sat, Mar 03, 2001 at 08:12:34PM -0500, Christopher W. Aiken wrote: > Anyone have OpenGL experience? I'm porting my companies > engineering software from HP/IBM/SGI UNIX systems to Linux. > Our graphics take advantage of OpenGL. From what I can see > OpenGL is a set of graphics libraries that need a special > graphics card to run. I found the OpenGL libraries (actually > Mesa libraries) but I need some recommendations for a graphics > card that is OpenGL capable and also Linux supported. > > I need to be able to tell our customers that we tested and > "certified" card "A", card "B", etc. that our software works > and works correctly with OpenGL. > > Recommendations please? Any special drivers for these cards > or is XFree86 all that is needed?
It depends which cards you want to use. Matrox Cards have good easy driver support. 3DFX cards are also pretty well supported. NVidia chipsets are harder to set up - you have to delete afew soft-links and install some of their proprietry drivers and edit a few config files. But it can be done. If you want any hardware acceleration then you have to upgrade to XFree86 4.0 or higher. This is fairly painless, and if you use a 2.4 kernel aswell then you can turn on the direct rendering infrastructure and get a big performance boost. NVidia cards generally have the best OpenGL support in terms of speed and in terms of the implementation of the standard. However, their drivers are not Open Source and are slightly trickier to install than other manufacturers. I use an NVidia TNT2 M64 and am very happy with Quake III performance!! Things are pretty stable with a 2.4.2 kernel, XFree86 4.0.2 and their 0.95 drivers [patched for 2.4.x series kernels]. Their 0.96 drivers don't work for me. Hope this helps, Matthew -- Matthew Sackman Nottingham, ENGLAND Using Debian/GNU Linux Enjoying computing
