Abbreviated summary of SLUG meeting, 27 Oct 2000.
I got in a bit late so I missed the Q&A.
Gareth Hughes on DRI
Gareth is employed by VA to work on better support and performance for
3D cards under Linux.
This is being done through a mechanism called DRI (Direct Rendering
Infrastructure). Gareth only had time for an overview, but
this is basically an extension to the X protocol and some
kernel modules.
DRI should be going into XFree86 4.02. Gareth had some comments
on 3D cards in general. For example the close relationship between
SGI and Nvidia.
Gareth also speculated on why some manufacturers had binary only drivers.
There seems to be a large amount of cross licensed material limiting
the ability of some manufacturers to release source code.
Gareth gave some quite impressive demos, Quake III, the teapot,
sproingies and couple of others. These were very impressive, with
quite high frame rates on fairly ordinary hardware.
There was a little discussion about frame rates and quake, and
how important they were to survival and winning tournaments.
(Perhaps the issues could be resolved in a demo tournament :)
It was great to hear about some leading edge stuff. Once again
the numerous side comments really gave a great insight into what's
happening in this area.
Conrad demo-ed his sweep package, which is progressing quite nicely.
It's a sound editor. He has been able to leverage off the work
of a standard plug in set.
Conrad was a little rushed but there was a lot of interest.
Mama's afterwards was good. A little slow in getting the food, but good
value I thought. Good to chat to old friends and new.
Many thanks to Gareth, if you're reading this, and Conrad.
To the guys who organise the meetings, they really are enjoyable
and worthwhile.
Jamie
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