[lug] 3dfx graphics technology

[Jeff Howell]

It's not really Nvidia's fault the drivers aren't open. They have 
repeatedly said that the would like to open the drivers. But unfortunately, 
there is Intellectual Property from other vendors (SGI's 'official' OpenGL 
Code among others) and they cannot opensource the driver unless the other 
parties agree. But I must admit, Nvidia's driver is BY FAR the best 
performing, stable GLX driver's I've ever used. There's even patches for 
the open parts of the kernel module so that it will compile under 2.4. I 
have noticed a slight slowdown of the drivers under 2.4 however. Not 
visible, but my framerates in Quake3 and Unreal are about 5% lower. We'll 
have to see when 2.4 is offical, there are offical 2.4 compatable drivers 
from Nvidia, and Xfree 4.0.2 is out (DGA2 finally working with OpenGL, woohoo!)

As far as 3dfx is concerned, good riddance. They haven't made anything good 
since the Voodoo2. Their drivers, while opensource, have had miserable 
performance compared to the win32 drivers. Even their win32 drivers are 
weak. 3rd party hacks have to be used (Wicked GL) to get full performance 
from their cards. Unless you're running something native in 3dfx's 
propietary GLIDE libraries, performance will always be sub-par.

Scott Herod wrote:

> I may have to take back some of the things I said
> about the voodoo cards at Thurs. meeting.  I wonder
> how the combined companies will handle linux.  3dfx
> has always been very open, while nvidia, has not
> (although do provide some of the best linux drivers
> for their hardware).
> 
> http://www.3dfx.com/comp/news/rel-15dec_2.htm
> 
> 
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-- 
  Jeff Howell
  EDS Unix Support

   Linux Slackware: The Ultimate NT Service Pack