On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 07:06 -0500, sean wrote:

On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 05:19:49 +0100 Ralf Corsepius rc040203@freenet.de wrote:

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What do you guys do when you want decent 3D performance?

Use the proprietary drivers ... :-)

There are few cases where resorting to proprietary drivers is required. There are open source drivers that provide good-enough 3d for the needs of many Linux users.

Wishful thinking - Try finding a notebook without an ATI or Nvidia graphics card ...

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You are ignoring the fact, Linux has a strong user base in people with a scientific/engineering/technical background ...

Engineers may have needs which can't be met by open source 3d drivers today. Not sure who you're grouping into the scientific and technical categories though, i have a technical background and my needs are met perfectly well by open source 3d drivers.

Mine are not - I am working on 3d simulations/animations/visualizations. For my applications, the nvidia driver outperforms the nv driver by ca. factor 10. On top of that, for the hardware I have available, the nv driver had been non-functional on one machine before FC4.

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Whether you like it or not ... reality is different.

You should speak for yourself instead of imagining you have a better grasp of reality than everyone else :oP

ROTFL ...

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People are pragmatically using what they have/can get/are supplied with, and will ditch the distro or even the OS if it doesn't suite to their demands. Fortunately for Fedora, the proprietary drivers have worked sufficiently well.

Many people have been misinformed on this matter by others who are fixated on the latest-and-greatest graphics speed.

I am not talking about squeezing the "max" out of the latest and greatest graphics HW, I am talking about: - Getting 3D/GL functional at all. - Getting a reasonable 3D/GL performance. - Getting access to advanced GL features. all on moderate to old graphic NVidia cards.

Personally I think it's time for a more rational discussion about the capabilities and performance levels actually needed by most people.

If you want to get a feeling about what I am talking about, try SceneViewer (From Inventor, in FE) with one of the models from the Large Geometry Repository, or try the Coin Examples from sim.no (Not in FE).

Ralf