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Re: Matrox G450 hw acceleration?



On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 22:42:00 +0200 (CEST)
Terje Fåberg <terje_fb@yahoo.no> wrote:
>
> Hello everybody,
> 
> I just installed flightgear on my sarge system and
> discovered it it running with approx 1 frame per
> second. 
> 
> Honestly, I'm not sure whether my system runs 
> with hw acceleration or not. How can I find out
> if I use sw or hw rendering?
> 
> "glxgears" gives me 205 fps on this P3-866 with
> a matrox G450. Is this accelerated? 

Other people have essentially answered your question (look at the
output of "glxinfo").  I'd just like to provide you with some other
information that may be useful.

1.  If there's another open source/free software OpenGL app that's
as demanding as FlightGear, I'm not aware of it.  Framerates with
anything other than really good hardware tend to be poor.  When I
used to have a Matrox G550 running on an Athlon XP 2000+, I got 6-9
fps when flying around the default area (San Francisco Bay).

2.  There are a variety of things you can do to improve your
framerates and make things more liveable.  They include:

a) flying around someplace less urban, with less structures and
towers and so forth, than SF;

b) turning down your realism through command line options, e.g.
--fog-fastest or --disable-specular-highlight or --disable-skyblend
or so forth;

c) not setting any ridiculous defaults.  A lot of people that have
framerate or memory problems turn out to have done something really
stupid like set --visibility-miles=200 in the command line or in their
.fgfsrc;

d) go to where the data is located (in Debian's package, it's in
/usr/share/games/FlightGear/), rename the "Textures.high" directory,
and symbolic link the Textures directory to Textures.high.  This will
cause fgfs to always use low-res ground textures.

e) get a video card that's better at 3D stuff.  When I switched from
the Matrox G550 to an nVidia GF4 Ti4600, my framerates flying around
downtown SF jumped from ~6 to ~17.  This is especially worth
considering for Matrox cards, given that they're tuned for excellent
2D performance, and don't have very good 3D performance at all.  Plus,
Matrox doesn't seem to be making much of an effort to maintain their
Linux drivers, the DRI project doesn't seem to be doing much with the
Matrox DRI drivers, etc.

f) run the current CVS version (and the CVS versions of plib and
SimGear) rather than Debian's package.  A few of the developers have
been putting a lot of effort into improving the efficiency of the parts
of FlightGear and its dependent libraries where most of the time gets
spent.  Two patches to plib that were put out this weekend (and some
new code in SimGear/FlightGear to detect their presence) has resulted
in a near doubling of framerates for pretty much everyone.

You might also consider subscribing to flightgear-users and discussing
your problems with it there.

HTH.

-c

-- 
Chris Metzler			cmetzler@speakeasy.snip-me.net
		(remove "snip-me." to email)

"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear

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