Slow OGL on linux

Just installed Red Hat Linux 7.3. Using glut to make opengl programs. I have a dual boot system with win 98. The programs run smoothly under windows but become extremely slow on Linux. This problem had not occurred in Red Hat 7.1 which I had earlier. Which settings should I tweak to make my programs run smoothly? It would be helpful if u could also state how since I am not an experienced linux user.

Thamks for any help.

Seems likely you’ll have to install an OpenGL driver for your video card. What kind of video card do you have?

I have an Intel 810e motherboard with onboard display. That is - my video card is intel 810. this was correctly detected during installation. RH linux 7.1 was fine with the drivers. Do I have to separately install the OGL drivers for version 7.3?

Goto mesa3d.sf.net and compile it. It will make OGL run much faster.

Great! Here we go again. Nukem please stop misinforming people. Mesa is (in most cases, see blow) just a SW renderer and thus will run quite slow. Again from the FAQ section of mesa3d.sf.net:

1.2 Does Mesa support/use graphics hardware?
Yes. Specifically, Mesa serves as the OpenGL core for the open-source XFree86/DRI OpenGL drivers. See the DRI website for more information.

There have been other hardware drivers for Mesa over the years (such as the 3Dfx Glide/Voodoo driver, an old S3 driver, etc) but the DRI drivers are the modern ones.

1.3 What purpose does Mesa (software-based rendering) serve today?
Hardware-accelerated OpenGL implementations are available for most popular operating systems today. Still, Mesa serves at least these purposes:

Mesa is used as the core of the open-source XFree86/DRI hardware drivers.
Mesa is quite portable and allows OpenGL to be used on systems that have no other OpenGL solution.
Software rendering with Mesa serves as a reference for validating the hardware drivers.
A software implementation of OpenGL is useful for experimentation, such as testing new rendering techniques.
Mesa can render images with deep color channels: 16-bit integer and 32-bit floating point color channels are supported. This capability is only now appearing in hardware.
Mesa’s internal limits (max lights, clip planes, texture size, etc) can be changed for special needs (hardware limits are hard to overcome).

The DRI is the way to go and it seems that the i810 is supported so all you should have to do is install the X11 libs which you have since you’re running X. Now make sure that the DRI is enabled. I’m not sure how you do that in RedHat, check the docs.

[This message has been edited by zen (edited 07-22-2003).]

mesa will give him a driver and OpenGL. He needs a better drivers. Mesa supplies that.

Yes, Mesa will give him a driver, and it might be pretty good quality and feature-wise, but only because it will be a software driver and hence not too fast. Just read the mesa and dri faqs and you’ll get the picture.

nukem,

As Zen wrote, you are wrong. The normal Mesa distribution DOES NOT have a driver for the i810 (only older Voodoo1/2 hardware).

For i810 OpenGL acceleration, the poster should install a recent release of XFree86. It includes a DRI-based driver for the i810.

-Brian

Thanks everyone for the messages. But my problem is still not solved. I tried looking in the manuals for enabling DRI but couldn’t locate helpful information. Also considered recompiling mesa but I want to explore other options before compiling it.

Is it possible for me to replace some files with the older ones which worked. AS I have already stated, the 7.1 version worked fine. If it is possible for me to get some files from that distro which my friend is running and replace them over my current files, please direct me as to which files I should be looking for.

Also if anyone is using RedHat 7.3 and knows how to enable or tweak settings for DRI, do let me know.

Thanx Again.

[This message has been edited by abhijeet_maharana (edited 07-31-2003).]

Perhaps this is a silly question, but why didn’t you just install Red Hat 9.0 and forget about all the stuff like mixing old software with other old software and doing hard things to make flaky things work?

I surely would have tried that if I had the installation CDs. I can’t download it from the net coz I use a public computer to access the net. Still, I am keeping my eyes open for a newer version. In the meantime, I wanted to do something about the version I have. Thanx.

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