[vox-tech] What's needed for 3D support?

[Rod Roark]

Arrrgh.

What did next (with Gentoo) is set a flag telling it I=20
have a 3dfx card, and then rebuild xfree (and an associated=20
glide3).  That gives me a tdfx_dri.so.

Now, running glxinfo (or tuxracer) produces this message:

"gd error (glide): grSstSelect: non-existant SSTgd error (glide): grSstSe=
lect: non-existent SSTSegmentation fault"

Seems like something is out of sync.  One thing I noticed is
there's also a "voodoo3" flag that you're supposed to set if=20
you have that card -- do you think I should treat my banshee=20
as a voodoo3?

-- Rod

On Thursday 20 June 2002 11:33 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> begin Rod Roark <rod@sunsetsystems.com>
>
> > On Thursday 20 June 2002 03:25 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > > the linux gamers' howto might be helpful.   :-)
> >
> > Well it's nice to have the author right here.  :-)
> >
> > > in startx 2>X.err make sure the DRI is enabled.  it probably isn't.
> > > try to find a line beginning with (WW) or (EE) that gives a clue wh=
y it
> > > isn't being started.
> >
> > OK sure enough it wasn't.  After I figured out that the
> > relevant messages are in /var/log/XFree86.0.log,
>
> sorry.  i should've mentioned the location.
>
> > I then learned that I needed to run at 16-bit color depth,
>
> yep.  i think i mention this in the howto.  voodoo acceleration happens
> only at 16 bpp.
>
> > and also Load "dri" in XF86Config.  That gets me this in the
> > log file:
> >
> >   (II) TDFX(0): [DRI] installation complete
> >   (=3D=3D) TDFX(0): Direct rendering enabled
>
> great!
>
> > That's the good news.  The bad news is, it didn't make
> > any noticable difference for either tuxracer or billardgl,
> > even running as root.  They are still slower than snails
> > on ice.   :-(
> >
> > One more data point.  Doing the strace on tuxracer, I see that
> > it's looking for /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/tdfx_dri.so which
> > does not exist.  There are several other *_dri.so's in there,
> > but tdfx is not one of them.
> >
> > Any other thoughts appreciated....
>
> aha.  strace is one of my favorite tools.
>
> as you know, mesa is an implementation of of opengl.  they don't really
> write mesa with backends for cards that require DRI for 3d rendering.
> these days, xfree86 does that.
>
> xfree86 maintains it's own implementation of mesa (which gets resynced
> with mesa every so often).  this is the library you need, and this is
> the library you're missing.
>
> in debian, this library is packaged as "xlibmesa".  i don't know what
> gentoo (mandrake?  what distro are you using for this machine?).
>
> i guess the *short* answer is "install whatever package provides
> tdfx_dri.o".   the longer answer is "install the mesa library that
> uses DRI for hardware acceleration that's written by xfree86".
>
> pete