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Re: So, what's up with the XFree86 4.0 .debs?



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.


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