Wild and crazy times for the development tree

[Mike A. Harris]

Ian Pilcher wrote:
> Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 
>>All proprietary drivers?  ;o)
>>
> 
> 
> I can't help wondering...
> 
> What do you guys do when you want decent 3D performance?

That'll likely vary greatly from person to person, rather than there
being one single unified answer.

To be honest, for my own personal needs, I generally don't need
mandatory OpenGL 3D acceleration support in Linux for 99.99999%
of what I use Linux for day to day.  In fact, my primary desktop
system usually has DRI disabled, as this machine is used almost
entirely for 2D only usage, and having DRI enabled just leaves
another potential source of instability for me.

Whenever I do need/want 3D enabled support for something in Linux,
I fire up another machine and use it instead, leaving my primary
desktop in a stable DRI-disabled state.

To answer the "when do I want decent 3D performance" question,
I must first answer "When do I want accelerated 3D at all?".

99.99999% of the time I never need 3D acceleration in Linux
personally.  I disable the screensaver completely, or else pick
the "Matrix" saver, or some other boring simple screensaver, and
I don't use any 3D software in Linux generally.  The only real
use of OpenGL/3D software that I have would be for video games,
or for fun eye-candy stuff.  I generally turn eye-candy type of
stuff completely off on my computers that are intended for
productive work use, and I don't install video games on them
either, for the same reason.  ;o)

So, what do I use OpenGL for?  More or less for video games,
in the rare occurances that I actually have time to play games.
However, and I hate to admit this but I'm being totally honest
here - when I do actually have some spare time to play computer
games, I want to spend _all_ of that time actually playing the
games themselves and enjoying myself doing so, and spend zero of
my time trying to get the games to actually work.  As such, I
personally just play games in Windows XP and be done with it.

Please do not take that as a suggestion for what everyone else
should do however.  I admire the people out there who have the
dedication and spare time to install 3rd party emulators such
as winex or whatever is the coolest thing nowadays, and then
fiddle with whatever settings are needed, fiddle with drivers
and whatnot to get the stuff working under Linux.  I know many
people out there have tonnes of cool games and other software
running in Linux using one or more emulation layers, and I have
done so myself in the past as well.  But I just got tired of
spending 4-8 hours of downloading and compiling various things
and tweaking them to "maybe" get something to work in Linux,
and not actually have any time to _use_ the game or whatever it
was after that.  Since "fun spare time" is a limited resource
to me, I've decided to just play the games I bolted out $60
for in the OS they were designed for - at least for the time
being, than to fight the fight.

Having said that, I do look forward to some time in the future,
hopefully this year, in which I'll have some extra spare cycles
to tackle the various emulators and whatnot out there and maybe
get some stuff running in Linux again.  ;o)  I do very much hate
using Windows for anything, but I bite my tongue and use it on
occasion just to make better use of my time.

Now...  if I _was_ actually trying to get a game or some other
accelerated OpenGL software to work in Linux, I would use
whatever the best card I have on hand with OSS driver support
was at the given point in time.  The FireGL 8800 is what I
generally use for that purpose when I do enable DRI, and it
generally works quite well.  It generally meets _my_ needs,
however being a few generations old, and not having all the
latest bells and whistles, it is almost definitely not going
to meet everyone else out there's needs.  If I found it too
slow for something, I'd perhaps drop in a 9800Pro and roll
myself a custom rebuild of Mesa with the r300 dri driver
enabled and fiddle a bit.  Again, I don't expect that this
type of situation would be an acceptable or desired solution
for many other people out there, but it is something I can
personally live with for the time being, without having to
resort to proprietary drivers.

If I did have applications that I wanted to run mandatorily,
which required accelerated 3D performance, if running them
in Linux on the FireGL 8800 didn't cut it for me, I'd run them
in XP, or probably not run them at all, and find a new hobby.

That's my take on things for _my_ situation only.  Again though,
each person's situation is different, and each person has different
wants and needs, and are willing to compromise in different areas.
Some people compromise with proprietary drivers, others use OSS
drivers and compromise features or stability, others, like me
sometimes compromise by using a different OS that does what I
need/want for the given task.  To each his own.

There simply isn't a good general one-size-fits-all solution that
makes everyone happy right now.  If there was, these type of
discussions wouldn't come up 10 times a week on various mailing
lists and start heated debates that prove nothing other than the
fact that different people have different needs and different
viewpoints. ;o)

Take care,
TTYL




-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.