Hello Curt, "Curtis L. Olson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Martin writes: >> It became sort of a hobby to collect used Unix workstations. [...] > > So should I assume that you are running fully open-source operating > systems, and fully open-source drivers on all your own hardware?
No, absolutely not. I earn my living from maintaining other people's UNIX/Linux servers and workstations (and networks in between) and my home collection serves as a testbed/playground for me - however you'd call it ;-) >> I have e workplace at a customer's location with a PC where I >> plugged my own graphics card which serves as temporary FlightGear >> testbed, > > I would love to hear which card/drivers you are using at your > customer's location. Are there any rendering bugs? Any odd xserver > crashes? What kind of performance are you getting compared to nvidia. I never owned an NVidia card, so I can't compare performance. Maybe someone else has the opportunity to do that: Currently I have a Radeon7500 plugged into a Pentium3/600 (I believe this one is still running at 66 MHz external clock) with standard SuSE-9.0 XFree (built from XFree86-4.3.0.1) and the daily CVS build gives me 10 fps when sitting on the default location at noon. In the first days of playing around with FlightGear (some days in the summer of 2000) I used a so-called ATI Rage128, in the spring of 2001 I bought a used Voodoo3/3000. On the (ooops, funny date) 24th December 2001 I got my firstRadeon (7000) and since then I've been sticking to that (Radeon 7500/9100) I already gave most of them away .... I've seen quite a lot of rendering errors and crashes during _development_ of the DRI (I've been testing DRI CVS trees almost since I got the first Radeon) and by trying out experimental features (T&L). The only drawback was the official release of XFree86-4.3, which was released with a completely outdated and buggy Radeon driver. David Dawes knew that when he did the release .... :-/ Linux distributors knew that as well and put a working one into their distros (as far as I remember). XFree86-4.4 will be an excellent choice as long as you stick to boards up to Radeon9200 (I'd have to look up these numbers because I didn't bother to remember). What people have already been suggesting in the 'early days' and what I refused to believe for quite a long period (which partially made me purchase my first SGI): The performance of the graphics card appears to have very little influence on the frame rate of FlightGear. At least I wasn't able to recognize any significant change when switching between these cards I mentioned above. Even the early PCI cards did a remarkable good job - with stock XFree86-4.x. > If there is a 3d card with open-source drivers that could perform as > well as nvidia in a do-or-die environment, I'd like to hear about it, > because to date, I have yet to see anything else that compares. Unfortunately my customer doesn't want me to spend large amounts of time with FlightGear, they even don't want me to plug pedals to the workplace :-) I'm happy that I can spend a few minutes per day to check out the daily build, so unfortunately I can't tell you anything about many hours' use but I'm still convinced that it is worth the effort to look at the Radeon cards - especially those from the mid-ages .... Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
