On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 11:18:09AM +0100, Sven LUTHER generated a stream of 1s and 0s: > Hello, > > Nice to hear about the future 4.0 plan. i agree with most of what you propose. > > I have a question conerning the 3D stuff. > > Glx will be included in XF 4.0, but this is a point that will most assuredly > confuse lots of people. > > In fact, (if i understood this issue correctly, which i am still not entirelly > sure) GLx is just some added support of XF 4.0 to be able to run openGL stuff > in a Xfree window.
GLX is already included in XF 4.0. GLX is a glue that holds X and a GL renderer together. > In particular, this has nothing to do with mesa/accelerated mesa/openGL, in > particular since the accelerated mesa stuff is called utah-glx, this could > cause lots of confusion. utah-glx is a bit of a misnomer, since most of the developement work is done with the low-level hardware rendering drivers, not higher level GLX server-client stuff. GLX uses Mesa library. Any applications compiled for use with Mesa can take advantage of using your hardware for rendering, if supported. > Also there is DRI, which has and has not something to do with this. > > But apart from all this, people (end user) will be downloading XFree 4.0 > packages (in phase3) and hope 3D accel to work just fine, since it was hyped > as one of the goals of Xfree 4.0, and with SGI giving out OpenGL code and > other such stuff. So best would be to be thinking about it and also include > the mesa maintainer in the reflection about future XFree 4.0 packages, unless > we want people complaining about why quake3 or whatever is not working as > expected for them. DRI allows bypassing network pipe in X for the data going to your card, resulting in better performance. So it's something like Application->GLX->DRI>Hardware. Please correct me if I am wrong. XF86 4.0 only supports 3Dfx for hardware rendering. 4.01 should include utah-glx which will provide support for Matrox NVIDIA and Rage Pro cards. You can use utah-glx right now to play Q3 Arena, and it runs very nice already even on my 4MB Rage Pro card with XF86 3.3.6.
