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I have an ancient 3Dfx Voodoo3 AGP card and would definitely like to have a hardware accelerated graphics for my 3D screensavers. I had this same problem on Windows, and I failed to get any opengl support because there were no drivers. It's kinda annoying when people just kept telling to go to "www.glsetup.com" and as we know, that thing hasn't been existed for some time now...
But how do I know whether I have a hardware acceleration on my Slackware Linux 9.1? I'm pretty much confused with all this DRI/GL/OpenGL/glide/Mesa/GLUT/GLX/... thing. It's actually been so long since I played games (on Windows, that is) and knew more about this stuff. I had this same machine but can't remember how I got these things to work. Well, maybe it was only the mighty mysterious DirectX, which one just installed and that was everything you could ever need...
I use xscreensaver and received GLX error messages when trying to view 3D savers (like the 3D bubbles thing and the trampoline cow... ). So I went to /etc/X11/XF86Config and uncommented the Load "glx" and Load "dri". No idea what that means, but it worked. But they are very slow and it definitely seems that they aren't using the hardware.
I checked. Yep, tdfx driver is configured there. Just how I set up with xf86config.
Code:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Voodoo3 AGP"
Driver "tdfx"
VideoRam 16384
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection
Ok, well my question is more simple than that novel I first wrote. How do I get 3dfx Voodoo3 hardware acceleration for xscreensaver? What graphics library does xscreensaver use? Do I need OpenGL or what?
In case of OpenGL, . I spent so big amount of my valuable time trying to get it (Really Slick Screensavers, GPL, www.reallyslick.com) work in Win98, no luck. I have glide, glut, sdl, working drivers and dri already. I can clearly see that the screensaver isn't using hardware. Celeron 333Mhz + 128Mb RAM + Voodoo3 in AGP slot is like a dream when configured correctly.
Hey I figured it out. I uncommented the DRI section in XF86Config and now the 3D screensavers seem to run smooth. Here:
Code:
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection
Still there seems to be minor problems, but the GL savers work now. I couldn't even preview them before. I wonder if that DRI thing made them work, no?
It's absolutely possible. DRI stays for Direct Rendering Infrastructure and allows to use hardware directly (in this case, graphic card). So it means DRI wasn't running correctly before you uncommented its section. Now you can probably run 'glxinfo' and see if its' output looks correctly (may be a bit cryptic, but if you don't find much about software rendering, there's a big chance you have acceleration fully running).
The reason I still bring this up is the "Atlantis" screensaver (http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/atlantis.gif). It has once again got unbearably slow but used to run smoothly. Sometimes it works, sometimes doesn't?
I'd paste parts of the output table here but I don't know how to copy text from Eterm.
EDIT:
I used gnome-terminal and succesfully copied the glxinfo table. I'm not going to paste the whole thing, just parts of it. I hope it will clear things.
Code:
visual x bf lv rg d st colorbuffer ax dp st accumbuffer ms cav
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro r g b a bf th cl r g b a ns b eat
----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x23 16 tc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x24 16 tc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 0 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 Slow
0x25 16 tc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 0 0 16 16 16 0 0 0 Slow
0x26 16 tc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 0 8 16 16 16 0 0 0 Slow
0x27 16 tc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 16 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x28 16 tc 0 16 0 r . . 5 6 5 0 0 16 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 Slow
It should be in 2nd line.
Could you check if the problem with screensaver running at different speeds may be connected with resolution of you're still running the same?
Now I changed the settings a bit and it works perfectly. I just added 2 more sharks and made them more aggressive. Then added a bit more swimming speed for the whales.
I don't know why this happens. It must be the screensaver, not my machine.
glxinfo says direct rendering: yes. I already got the info I needed and all the other screensavers are using hardware without a doubt. All's well that ends well.
Another thing you could have tried was to add your display driver to the opengl engine
#> opengl-update tdfx
This works for adding NVidia display drivers to the opengl engine also
#> opengl-update nvidia (note nvidia not nv)
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3D hardware acceleration (3dfx, opengl, ...)
). So I went to /etc/X11/XF86Config and uncommented the Load "glx" and Load "dri". No idea what that means, but it worked. But they are very slow and it definitely seems that they aren't using the hardware.
