On Wed, 12 Sep 2001, Brett Bolen wrote:
> [Xpert] GLX over network...Here is an old email I found. It states that
> opengl apps do not use hardware acceleration unless direct rendering is
> used ( with the exception of the closed source nvidia drivers).
>
> Is this still the case?
I haven't heard that this has changed, although I am still running 2.2
kernels, so haven't kept up with the latest DRI.
Essentially, the point is that with DRI, the client thread talks to the
kernel which talks to the hardware. This bypasses the X protocol,
and inter-process communication, so is more efficient.
However that means that there is no need to put code in the Xserver
thread to talk to the 3D hardware.
Until somebody gets around to adding that code (possibly by having
a dedicated DRI process which gets passed the GLX data that comes
into the server) there is no hardware 3D acceleration for remote clients.
I believe that hardware accelerated 3D of remote clients was possible
with the early voodoo cards and XFree86 v3.3. Since these cards were 3D
only, Mesa could be made to act as a GLX server. I think this might have
used the Utah-GLX code.
I've been told that Silicon Graphics don't accelerate remote 3D either.
No doubt this is only true for some of there systems, but it may mean
that XFree86 isn't alone in this deficiency.
--
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
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