Martin Spott writes: > 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.
Ideally what I like to shoot for is a solid 60hz. If you set your monitor to refresh at 60hz and then lock the rendering to the vblank signal, (and you can get a solid 60hz out of flightgear) then you get extremely smooth and fluid frame rates. It's *really* nice. It makes those little frame rate blips and glitches seem incredibly annoying after you've seen FG running at a solid 60hz. > 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 released with a completely outdated and buggy Radeon driver.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. The newer cards are faster. What that gives you is the ability to run at higher resolutions and still maintian your target frame rate. Or it gives you the ability to turn up the FSAA and still hit your target frame rate; or turn up anisotropic texture filtering and keep your frame rates going. FSAA can make a big difference in reducing aliasing artifacts and anisotropic texture filtering can make the texture (especially the runway marking textures) ****much**** sharper. Definitely play with these features if you haven't. Unfortunately, the older middle-ages cards, just don't have the horsepower to run these more advanced features at high resolution and still keep a decent frame rate. In my mind, that is the big win for the newer cards. As you point out, FG currently isn't using any advanced rendering tricks of the newer cards. Someday we'll probably want to look into some spiffier graphical effects, but hey, people need a reason to buy MSFS. We aren't here to put anyone out of business. :-) Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
