Elite3D, Xfree and 3Dacceleration

Gecklord · Apprentice Joined: 17 Mar 2004 Posts: 174

Hi!

Did anyone manage to get 3D acceleration running with an Elite3D-m3 and Xfree?
Using Xorg I was able to run glxgears but with just 30FPS!

glxgears always tells me that dri is not enabled or something like that but I've already enabled it in XFree86Config!

I want to get it working to enjoy 3D and also to give Ferris input for his Elite - Xorg <--> Xfree performance comparison!

Thanks alot!

blaster999 · Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2004 11:59 am Post subject:

Try
http://dri.sf.net
download their CVS version and follow the build instruction (found in the building section).
EDIT: Here is the direct link:
http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/Building
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Ferris · Posted: Sat Jul 10, 2004 6:14 pm Post subject:

As best as I can tell, Elite is never going to be as good as Creator for dri-type applications, because
(apparently) it can't do it. At least, neither the kernel nor the xorg driver (sunffb) supports it.

That said, there is a suboptimal way to get acceptable performance from the Elite. Look through the forum topic on xorg-x11: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=174481
and look at the Mesa3D notes at http://dev.gentoo.org/~fmccor/docs/xorg/xorg.html
which explains how to swap in Mesa's libGL in place of xorg-x11's version. I do not like this
solution, but it is easy, and it does get about the best out of Elite as is possible.
Unfortunately, the libGL (glx) changes between the (not-quite-working) version in xfree and the (working) version in xorg
are significant. I haven't chased down the spot in glx where it decides to give up on
even trying dri on the video card and go indirect instead. That's where the performance hit is.

The easiest solution is for Gentoo to make current Mesa available as an alternative to xorg libGL. But there
are two things holding me back from recommending that:

It's unaesthetic;
It's a bad solution if your system has both a Creator and an Elite in it, and you
are using both. It slows the Creator down a little bit.

This isn't the best news for you, but at least it might give you some ideas.

Regards,