I recently upgraded to XFree86 4.4 and it seems to have broke my 3D games.
When I try to run any, I get as far as SDL initialized, it hangs with a blank , black window. For example, when I start a game from terminal It normally runs as such:

randomizing.
SDL initialized.
video mode set (bpp=16 RGB=565 depth=16)
-OpenGL-----------------------------------------------------
Vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer : RIVA TNT/AGP
Version : 1.2.2
Extensions :
GL_ARB_multitexture
etc.etc.etc.

Now when I run a game I get :

randomizing.
SDL initialized.


and that's it.

anyone have any ideas why this is happening?

Just an Idea, did your re-install your video driver After
you upgraded X??

if not, try it and see what happens........

I did try that, no success. I have a suspicion that XFree 4.4 may have overwrote some 3D files like libGL.so, etc. or may have symlinked them improperly. I'm going to do some more digging. Since SDL worked before I find it difficult to believe that it is the culprit here.

Solved!
I downloaded a new i810 driver for XFree86 4.4 from here http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/drivers/x86/
installed and restarted X. Everything is okay!!
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.