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Linux Software

3dfx Glide and DRI Open Sourced 152

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-hack-on dept.
jazzman45 writes "3dfx has released glide v3 as open source. There's the link to the driver's page. It has support for XF86 v4 and it's DRI structure! I found a link to someone's screenshots of Q3Arena in Linux. "
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

3dfx Glide and DRI Open Sourced More

3dfx Glide and DRI Open Sourced

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  • > Are these open ala Nvidia and Sblive, "Here's some code but no specs"

    Dammit, I'm real tired of people saying this about nVidia. Try these [nvidia.com] on for size.
  • Ok. I have a Voodoo3 3000. I play q3test all the time (tweedgeezer, for those who care). What I don't quite understand, though, is what exactly is the point of this? Everything works right now. If I install these drivers will I get better framerate? Will I be able to play q3 without using the command line option "+set in_dgamouse 0"? Why would I want to install these rpms?

    Perhaps it's for that nice open source feeling :-)

    Jeremy

  • Um...that Mesa support for Voodoo2 etc. is just a wrapper around the Glide libraries, which with this new development don't look like they're going to be updated for much longer.

  • Oops. I thought we were talking about the 3dfx code. 3dfx code didn't go through a preprocesor. I lost the subject of the thread. Sorry.

    - |Daryll

  • Darryl, you are the man. Single handedly giving us some good 3D in Linux. GREAT!
  • Well, before there was no V3 of Glide. Before, Glide only ran on x86 hardware.

    Everything has changed. The license seems to be an attempt at being compatable with the XFree86 license.

    Pan
  • Personally, I'm not as happy about the fact that it's Open-Source. That was inevitable; it's a Good Thing, but hey, it was coming. What I'm happy about is that this can now be ported to other architectures (last I checked, PPC, Sparc, and Alpha didn't seem to have any 3D acceleration yet; I know PPC doesn't).

    Dammit; I keep trying to resist the urge to buy a Voodoo3 instead of waiting for V4, and then something like this has to come along and tempt me again. I suppose I'll be able to hold out till the PPC port is working. Here's hoping that's not till after the V4 is out :)
  • With a head full of ignorance and a pocket full of cash, I headed out to my local electronics superstore 2 days ago to catapult myself into the wonderful world of 3D. After much debating, I adventually left the store with an Elsa Erazor III, a TNT 2 based card, based on the fact that (1) it came with 3D shutter glasses (I'm a sucker for gimmicks), and (2) Nvidia seemed to be the most linux friendly graphics manufacturer out there.

    Now, the 3D in windows is wonderful, and the glasses are impressive, but seeing how I'm in linux 99.9% of the time, this doesn't matter a great deal. It seems that performance on a TNT2 in linux is still substandard (I actually haven't gotten it to work at all yet, but that's my own fault), so, with this receint development, would it be in my best intrest to return it and get a Voodoo 3? Also, on a side note, is there a 'TNT under linux' resource that's any better than Nvidia's site?
  • The new DRI release does work on Banshee. Last weekend durring testing I had some trouble with the video signal being very wiggly. However other have had a lot of success with DRI on Banshee. I invite you to try it out and see how it works. Then give us some feedback on the results in the newsgroup (3dfx.glide.linux)
  • I see the headline, and think to myself, "Self, it looks like you'll be able to use that VooDoo card in your AlphaStation afterall!" Then I see that it's voodoo3 only. Damn the electric fence.
  • What changed after 3dfx Open Sourced glide for V3 (its not GPL, its kinda close)? That question is complicated because a lot happened on Monday.

    Here's what happened. 3dfx offered a prerelease of XFree86 4.0 with DRI support for Mesa using glide3x. All of this is new. XFree86 4.0 and DRI allow better support for Mesa rendering. Glide3x is a newer version of the Glide library. Previously only Glide2x was availiable for Linux. Glide3x is a bit different from Glide2x and they are not binarily compatible (like libc5 and glibc2.0 and glibc2.1 are not compatbile). They also aren't source compatbile but a porting job can usually be done pretty quickly.

    Now for the open source. Within the same prerelease 3dfx also released the complete Glide3x source code for Voodoo3. This can be built for DRI or as a standalone API. What happened after this source release? Not much yet, its only been availiable for a few days and it took some time for people to notice it.

    Joseph Kain

  • This is all very nice and stuff, but I've never been fantastically impressed by 3Dfx cards... Okay, they're fast at blitting stuff to the screen/framebuffer. But that's about it; the 16-bit colour depth restriction is cripplingly bad (yes, it's perfectly possibly to tell the difference between 16 and 24/32 bit colour depths with the human eye; don't anyone tell me it isn't - check out freespace 2 running on a Voodoo 2 if you don't believe me), and the fact that now the Voodoo 4 and 5 have been announced with no kind of geometry acceleration suggests that 3Dfx are content to rest on their laurels and just bang up RAMDAC clock speeds in the hope processors can catch up...

    I'm sorry if I seem ungrateful and all that, but the tying of the Linux 3D market to 3Dfx cards (as it effectively is at the moment) is a bad thing, we're suffering from relatively low quality graphics compared to the 'doze world...

    However, if this means that it's now going to be easier to write glide wrappers for other cards which do support some kind of extra acceleration, then this makes me happy...

    Any news on the state of play with Linux and the GeForce yet?

  • I like 3dfx. I HAVE 3dfx. Quake3 and Unreal Tournament are sweet. The fact that now the drivers are open source is even sweeter because I sure would like to wrap my brain around it for a little while, see what makes it go. I wonder what effect this will have on 3dfx card makers though? Maybe none, maybe a lot. I think that that is why many commercial companies don't go opes source, because we would take the code (not a bad thing) but many more of the same product would be released, driving the company out of business. Aw, who knows.


    If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
  • If the distribution and/or use of the Program or Derivative Works
    is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted
    interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under
    this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation
    excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in
    or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License
    incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.

    Funny this looks remarkably like Section 8 of the GPL [fsf.org]
    8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.


    This is not to say that there aren't patent problems. It would be better if they explicitly licenced those particular patents to open source software or at least derivatives of this software. That should make any derivatives redistributable. If they did not do this and decided to sue later for patent infringement, I should think that one would have a case that they acted in bad faith, but IANAL.

    If they do not own the patents then all bets are off.
    --

  • Re:Does this mean we can have Glide with a TNT car (Score:3)

    by Zalgon 26 McGee ( 101431 ) on Thursday November 18, 1999 @12:53AM (#1523201)
    Such a beast already exists - Creative reverse engineered Glide for their own TNT cards, and called it Unified.

    It's really just a D3D wrapper, but it may be what forced 3dfx's hand.

    ---

  • I think it's a bit scary when they just assume you have Redhat. What about us Slackers (heh).. or FreeBSD people? Devils like fragging too.

    -Warren
  • I'm pretty new to 3D, and only rendering boring stuff like prostates, bladders and rectums, but I was wondering...

    As far as I understand, all the drivers developped nowadays are for interactive 3D or real time 3D. Sometimes in scientific imaging, all you are really interested in is non-interactive rendering, like the stuff you would get from pov, renderman or radiance...

    In this respect, it'd be much more interesting to use the 3D accelerator for just console-based rendering.

    I know there was a plug for running mesa in parallel that would also support voodoo 1 at some point...

    Is there any work done for accelerating this kind of "console" rendering or is all the work these days done on xfree drivers?

    ---

  • Time to do the happy dance! Although 3dfx has never been stingy with the code before, this makes things even better. :)

    Oh yeah, 1st post. :)

    Deosyne
  • Not only did that server get /.ed, but this entire side of campus seemed to be kinda slow today. I go to Georgia Tech and use the eastnet network.

    --
  • Its funny, my stepdad (clueless) made the association that linux = redhat, and he is right. If you think you can run linux in any way shape or form that doesnt involve redhat or its method of doing things, you are mistaken. Try installing this tool on a non-rhat system. /usr/src/redhat? wtf i thought it was rpm, some package manager. How about we rename it and maybe so many people wont have such a big beef about using REDHAT PACKAGE MANAGER, Linux Package Manager? I dunno just a suggestion.

  • Oh... wait a sec.. yeah, I guess that isn't actually that off topic for this story... Sorry All!!

    Oh well... First Post, then? :-)

    --Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com [thehungersite.com]

  • Of course, everything released as open source cannot be bad, but in the applications-known-not-to-work department, we can see some ultra-classics that should work: Quake, Quake II and UnReal Tournament. OTOH, Quake 3 is supposed to work fine with that stuff.

    This does not quite convince me that my next 3D graphics board should be a Voodoo-whatever, though. Does anybody know if TNT drivers have been open-sourced yet?
  • If he didn't want the answer, he wouldn't have asked the question. Mellow out, dude.

  • Way cool but... (Score:3)

    by Fritti ( 39146 ) on Wednesday November 17, 1999 @10:19PM (#1523214)
    While I do appreciate the fact that 3Dfx is making the source available, it isn't the complete Glide library that older applications (such as Quake II) depend on. Rather, it is a subset of the Glide API that allows Mesa and their new OpenGL driver to access the Voodoo3.

    I'd like to see the source for the complete Glide library so that my "old" Voodoo2 can also use Glide3X. But, 3Dfx probably isn't going to release this, and they are equally less likely to update Glide for Linux (at least, they haven't done so in ages - Daryll, any takes on this one?)

    Oh well, I planned to go out and buy another 3D card for Q3Arena anyway...

    --Fritti
  • >Voodoo Rush is dead. It was still-born. Take it from someone who was foolish enough to actually buy one at one time.

    I agree - you are a fool.

    >Waah waah waahh... Look, 3dfx is still on probation in my book too, but god are you ever an ingrate. Has the Linux Way become to bitch at companies who don't do ALL your work for you?

    What exactly is your point? Glide is proprietary, and 3Dfx have been very vigorous in defending it (recall the Glide wrappers for TNT cards), preventing anybody from finding a way around the restrictions on it (like lack of cross-platform support, for a start). I paid exactly the same amount of cash for my Voodoo2 card as any Windows weenie, and yet the company that made that card still insists on treating me like a second-class citizen. Does that make me an ingrate? Or did you just feel like spouting bullshit?

    Why don't you take some time out to grow up.

  • TNT drivers have been open sourced for a long time now. Of course, they are non DRI; they pump all geometry and textures through a unix socket and draw in the context of the X server, so they're rather slow. Of course, with SGI and nvidia getting buddy-buddy, and SGI's apparent betting the farm on Linux, I suspect we'll see even more OpenGL support for nvidia hardware.

    now that 3dfx has finally opened up their 3d hardware, ATI is probably feeling pretty lonely.

    Now we wait anxiously for XFree86 4.0 and for pure 3d goodness.
  • Lately it's really seeming like 3dfx is just trying to redeem itself. First the open release of their texture compression, then the announcement of a line of difficult-to-believe 3D accellerators, and now releasing part of the source code to GLIDE -- the same thing 3dfx was so retentive about before. Seems peculiar, to be entirely honest... still, as of right now, their only redeeming values are their Linux support and glimpse at the OpenSource ideals.
  • you can't play quake3 on a voodoo2 in linux??????????

    man, that sucks

    It's good to see all the competition in 3d. Hopefully, market pressure and competition will help get us open source drivers.

  • this place has definitely been /.ed.....
  • Not at all, really. Oh, I'm sure that we've seen the last of Glide-only games, but Glide is still an excellent performer, so it behooves 3dfx to make it more convenient for programmers to utilize it, as their video cards (notice that this only affects the Voodoo 3, and I presume later versions, which is owned wholly by 3dfx, unlike the earlier Voodoos which they only provided processors for) are the only ones that support Glide natively. The more games that support Glide, the better the odds that people will decide to purchase a 3dfx card over a competitor, particularly since the Voodoo 4 will address the concerns that bug the existing cards, such as 32 bit rendering. I would wager that they will release the earlier versions of Glide open sourced once they release the Voodoo 4 as the older cards released by their now-competitors will no longer be produced.

    Deosyne
  • I wonder if this means they will be releasing a closed glide > 3 for windows soon.

  • They're working on figuring out how to make those apps work. rushed now, so I won't go into details, but essentially, Glide2x and Glide3 work in completely different ways, with different system calls. Hopefully they'll get it working soon, as now I have to keep an old version of X set up and use that to play UT :(
  • i originally bought a voodoo 3 3000 right when they came out and had bad performance with glide in quake games so i took it back and got a tnt2 ultra (also cause voodoo 3 is a 16bit card) because i knew nvidia would put out drivers. now the voodoo cards perform as well as in windows (so i hear), and the tnt2 well... it just sucks for 3d. i wish nvidia would get involved with the xfree 4 snapshots like 3dfx has lately. i've waited a few months with this card cause i don't want to support glide because its propriety, but now it looks like the only thing keeping me from it is the tnt2 being 32bit.... hell most things in linux require you to change to 16bit and don't support 32bit.. so maybe your right there is no question of which card to buy....
  • Creative reverse engineered Glide for their own TNT cards, and called it Unified.

    Can this be used by non-Creative labs TNT cards, such as the diamond ones?

    Anyone any idea? I looked for a proper GLiDE- wrapper for ages, but never could find anything beyond Ultra-HLE support.

  • They have some deal with ATI for open source drivers on some of their cards.

  • My god, Hell really has frozen over. The apocalypse really IS coming!
  • Sure, NVIDIA's TNT2 (possibly the plain old TNT, too) works windowed on Linux. Their X server/driver combo does not use DRI though, so it isn't quite that fast. ;^(

  • Stupid question? (Score:3)

    by moonboy ( 2512 ) on Thursday November 18, 1999 @02:39AM (#1523235)
    I don't know much about 3D on Linux (and 3D in general, actually) as I don't play games, but I'm curious. Will this make for more realistic (and/or better) 3D on Linux or do some things deeper in Linux (or X maybe?) need to be reworked? Like I said I haven't played games under Linux, but I've been under the impression that 3D under Linux wasn't spectacular because X wasn't a great platform (design-wise) for games. Just curious. It's one of those instances where I'm saying to myself, "I wonder...", so I thought I'd ask.

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • There may be some extremly high end cards to optimize this sort of rendering but this is unlikely.

    At root 3d cards liberally approximate lightining and reflection and other things to allow the operations to be performed extremly fast on specialized hardware.

    What you are talking about is accelerating raytracing/radiance type imaging which does not make such simple approximations and hence at root just requires a bunch of computational power (hence why titanic was rendered on hundreds of linux boxes and not "rendering cards").
  • OK, I'll probably get some flak for this but oh well. I'm EXTREMELY new to Linux, or any command-line OS. I've been trapped in the Mickeysoft empire for a LONG time (since DOS 5.0). But last night, thanks to the Propaganda website, I decided enough was enough, and just blew out all my Windows partitions, so I had 14GB for Linux. I have a Voodoo3 2000 AGP card, and I installed Red Hat 6.0. I have to manually enter stuff in for the card and monitor in Xconfigurator, which is cool, I can get 24bit color, etc. But when X/Enlightenment come up, my monitor's resolution is like 320x200!!! I CANNOT figure this out, and I NEED HELP PLEASE. Commissar88@netscape.net or casey_hendley@drsoptronics.com... Thanks in advance,
  • In this respect, it'd be much more interesting to use the 3D accelerator for just console-based rendering.

    One word: pbuffer [sgi.com]. It's an SGI GLX extension, but it would be really cool to have...

    Long live OpenGL!

  • i know this place is not really a messageboard for tech info, but you have two options... XF86Setup, and xf86config, use those two in different combos and you are bound to get itright sooner or later. also there might be a 3dfx howto but im not sure.


    "The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear." [microsoft.com]
  • You know, what makes me think that the boundary between interactive and "off-line" rendering hardware is getting blurred is stuff like the PS2 rendering engine doing stuff like povbench [haveland.com]

    As always on the internet, this has to be taken with a bit of caution, I don't even know if this is for real or not... but you get the idea.

    Isn't there anything on a 3D accelerator that could be used to accelerate pov and the like?

    ---

  • Too bad you'll only get to see it in 16 bit color. With teeny tiny textures. Let me know how many colors you can count in the lightning gun's flare..heheh...
  • What you are talking about is accelerating raytracing/radiance type imaging which does not make such simple approximations and hence at root just requires a bunch of computational power (hence why titanic was rendered on hundreds of linux boxes and not "rendering cards").

    Yes, but this could be used for generating so called low quality animations really fast (keyworkd here: non-interactive)... the new G400 MAXX has some very interesting bitmap bumping capabilities that could be implemented as OpenGL extensions (now it's just available in DirectSomething mode). Or you could use that for medical imaging. Network banwidth would be a problem, but I think it's worth considering...

  • Try 3dfxgamers.com...
    Last I checked they had voodoo drivers (I think for voodoo3, not sure about voodoo2)

    They have X drivers as well as FullScreen 3D stuff.
  • "never look a gift penguin in the mouth, or he just might spit."
    -- i just made this up

    "The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear." [microsoft.com]
  • Those screenshots would be much better as .gif's
    instead of .jpg. In case anyone doesn't know, GIF compression works well for things like cartoons, graphs, and computer generated images, while JPEG compression works well for real color pictures with no hard lines, like photographs and scanned images.

    -Ben.
  • I to dislike rpm's, but it's not that bad.
    Just use rpm2targz.....
  • They're missing the low-level details on how to talk to the card; instead you have to go through the obfuscated source code they provide. It's not completely useless, but it's not completely useful either.
  • Voodoo 1 (Canopus Pure3D) and q3test works fine, on a Pentium II 333 with a 2.2 kernel. With a T1, net games are very playable (they're playable with a modem, with the added latency), as long as you turn off the lighting effects (the Voodoo 1 can't keep up a framerate with them turned on).

    --
  • Or you could use that for medical imaging.
    I'm working on radiotherapy planning, and I can tell you that for interactive rendering, hardware accelerated OpenGL is just... so smooth :-)

    BUT! It's okay when nothing complicated is involved.. as in just the data m'am. In my case that would be the bladder/prostate/rectum compound, no texture, 1 or 2 lights, no shadow...
    If I were to add the patient skin with realistic semi-transparence and wanted to do functional animation as well, things bet much messier, and I (would) do that in pov... The problem then becomes, okay, everybody does it with clusters, but why? is it because 3D accelerated hardware is looked at the wrong way, or is it because this is not really the main focus (a.k.a games! :)

    A card designed for med imaging would need to do clever things as marching cubes maybe, and also raytracing from voxels (any other suggestions? :)
    A side note: for hardware accelerated opengl and computation, I use IDL [rsinc.com] on NT but am waiting for a comparable solution in Linux (yep, sure do!)

    ---

  • Hopefully, the XFree86 team will not stop development on 4.0, even if it is true.

    However, maybe it's time for the XF86 developers to open up more. I know that the 3.9.xx betas were supposed to start that process up.

  • Meta Post of Answers (Score:5)

    by Caballero ( 11938 ) <daryll@noSPAM.daryll.net> on Thursday November 18, 1999 @05:14AM (#1523254) Homepage
    There have been so many questions with interrelated answers that I thought I would just send out one big update.

    This is a prerelease of the DRI software for 3dfx. It includes FULL source. Because it is a prerelease we know there are bugs and issues. We're collecting feedback on the newsgroup news://news.3dfx.com/3dfx.linux.glide.

    It works with the Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo3. Early cards will never support it, because they are 3D only cards. It doesn't make sense to do X on them. (The Rush is an exception, but it is the so degenerate that it isn't worth the trouble.)

    The old cards will still work just fine with the old Mesa and Glide. Applications will be linked against Mesa, and if you have an old card it will use Glide2x and be fullscreen. If you have a new card, it will use Mesa+DRI and glide3x and possibly run in a window.

    This is a phased rollout. Right now we're in the "stealth" phase. :-) There will be more materials coming out over time and some more press releases to talk about it. So when you see the press releases you'll know about everything coming out.

    Why do you care about this? This lets you run multiple apps at once in a window. Performance is just about the same as fullscreen was. So, if all you cared about was full screen quake, this doesn't make any difference. If you wanted to run other apps, this is a big win. It is also the first full DRI solution, which should be helpful to other projects.

    This work emphasizes OpenGL. That's why the glide3x defaults to DRI only use. The code to make Glide3x work fullscreen non-DRI is included in the source tree. We want companies to use OpenGL. We realize there's a problem with Glide2x only applications. They won't work in this prerelease. Fixing that correctly means making Glide2x a DRI client. We're working on a solution to do that.

    Yes, it is yet another license. (I had nothing to do with that) If you have specific problems with the license bring them up on the newsgroup. They may get changed.

    What about other distros/OSes? You've got the source, go for it. We're still doing a prerelease. We've got other problems to worry about first.

    All this work was done by Precision Insight and 3dfx.

    I think I've got all the relevant questions. Hopefully this will get moderated up. I'll look for other questions later.

    - |Daryll

  • It's not obfuscated in any way.

    - |Daryll

  • "Realism" comes from a whole lot of different factors. Frame Rate is one of those factors. In order to get the best frame rate X needs to know the internal details of the 3d card. Open sourcing the drivers makes this possible for for free versions of X. The end result is that we should see faster frame rates using free versions of X but only for 3dfx cards.


    Realism can also come from using advanced features on the card which let gl programs do more work for little cost in frame rate. Open sourcing the drivers also makes this possible, but getting the best performance requires programmers to know which trade offs to make on which card. Although this is possible don't expect it too soon.


    This is news because a lot of people have these cards and it pressures other 3d card makers to follow.

  • > Why am I somewhat less than dazzled by drivers that (A) do not support Voodoo Graphics/Rush/2 cards, and (B) do not support the full Glide API?

    Voodoo Rush is dead. It was still-born. Take it from someone who was foolish enough to actually buy one at one time.

    Waah waah waahh... Look, 3dfx is still on probation in my book too, but god are you ever an ingrate. Has the Linux Way become to bitch at companies who don't do ALL your work for you?
  • awesome shots!! There servers totally hosed but I got almost all of em now so I'm gonna mirror them here [angelfire.com] as soon as that last one downloads... hopefully up within the hour. if I'm lucky and it doesn't timeout again...

    F'in cool, hehe!!

    MULLY

  • Could someone tell us something about the status of the Xfree86 snapshots - and why the next snapshot hasn't surfaced yet.

  • Just did :)
  • >You can't play quake3 on a voodoo2 in linux?

    Hell, man, you can play Quake 3 on a Voodoo 1 (ONE!) in Linux. I know -- I tried it. Lag was awful, but it was worth it to see the look on my friend's face when he realized I was using the same Voodoo1 that he couldn't get to work with Q3 under Windows...

  • Are these open ala Nvidia and Sblive, "Here's some code but no specs", or are the open ala Matrox g200/400, where you actually have specs and can do useful work beyond optimizing what they give you?

    Ah, You might mean: Are those Open Hardware? [openhardware.org]
    I guess not, at least there is not any common video card in Open Hardware Catalog. [openhardware.org]

    Do manufacturers even know that Certification exists, do they even care?
    - If not, it's because nobody asks that certification.
    Would you like to use it as definition of openess ... like GPL is now?
    - Then we must start using it, then others start asking about it ("Huh, what's that?"), and perhaps it can be become well known denifition.


    It's up to us
  • yes it is a dumb question, and the answer is yes.

  • Try Ctrl-Alt-+

    that's the Control Key, The Alt Key and then the Plus key
  • [sandeen@Lager sandeen]$ rpm -qpl tdfx_dri-3.9.16-3.src.rpm
    DRI.spec
    DRI.tgz
    glu.tgz
    glut.tgz
    misc.tgz
    unique.patch

    [sandeen@Lager sandeen]$ rpm -qpl Glide_V3-DRI-3.10-2.src.rpm
    3dfx.gif
    Glide3.10.tar.gz
    Glide_V3-DRI-3.10.spec

    Ooh! Look! Tarballs inside the RPM! :) Granted, that's kind of silly, and (much as I like Red Hat) I was a little dismayed to see the requirement for a RH 6.1 install. But... you want tarballs? You got tarballs. :)
    ----
  • Well, it would be nice if there were universal compatability; if they originally built and tested the drivers on RH, though, it makes sense to release them for RH when they're ready. If they waited to release until they had all the major flavors accounted for, then you probably wouldn't be seeing them for another few months. Heck, if'n you're the industrious type, set up a RH machine, get the source, and port it yourself--that's what open source is all about, right? :]
  • what's wrong with them? I'm not a hardware guy or a programmer guy, so bear with me. But what's missing?
    ----
  • He wasn't asking for source - he was asking for source *tarballs* since he didn't want to use RPM.

    I was pointing out that there *were* source tarballs, you just had to extract them from the RPM.
    ----
  • I emailed someone that I should know and I'll paraphrase the responses:

    Q: I hear a rumour that XiG has bought away several of the XF86 developers.
    A: A totally erroneous rumor.

    Q: Why no new snapshots?
    A: Because the developer in charge of snapshots hasn't uploaded any, probably due to having a life outside of XF86 development.

    Q: Has the CVS been shut down?
    A: No, in fact an update was made last week.

    Q: When will XF86 4.0 be released?
    A: Unknown, but it has not been terminated. There are still issues to be resolved and, as with all development, they want to avoid releasing a bad version.
  • That, of course, should read "I emailed someone _WHO SHOULD KNOW_..." Sorry.

    *sigh*

    matt
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What you want to do is to check out Darryl Strauss's excellent work with the with the VooDoo 3 (& Banshee) XServer. Until you install this you will not see any better than 320x200 on your card. Darryl's site is at www.linux3d.org [linux3d.org], but the status of the XServer development is at www.linux3d.org/status.html [linux3d.org]. Be sure to read whatever you find there, there's lots of good information, and you'll need it all. After you get X working correctly, for instance, you'll want to install the Glide RPM's to get your 3d working...

    If you're as new to Linux as you're saying, you may want to consider waiting a while before playing with the brand new versions of the 3DFX drivers that are being announced in this /. article, at least until they stabilize a bit. Finally, after you've R all TFM you can find, if you're still having problems and need assistance getting things working, you can point your favorite news reading client at news.3dfx.com and look for the various Voodoo Linux newsgroups. (I don't have the exact names with me at work, sorry.) The folks there are typically very responsive and helpful, but, please, read the last few weeks worth of posts to see if your question has already been answered before posting yourself.

    (Hmmmm.... just noticed that www.linux3d.org doesn't seem to be responding right now. A little busy with the big news, perhaps?)

    Good Luck!

  • Awesome, sounds very cool. This might be especially useful for massively multiplayer games (large scale war sims, maybe a MMP version of Rogue with simple windowed 3-d). Windows sucks hard at windowed 3d.
  • Pretty much ends the discussion on which type of video card to buy!

  • why would they open source their older cards ? yeah nvidia did it but they didn't -really- do it.. performance could be better on the older cards. 3dfx open sourcing their later cards is smart because well.. people will stop waiting for the older cards to gain better support and they'll buy newer ones waiting yet again for the drivers to come around to being top notch. my suggestion to those out there who want 3d .. get a 3d card that works now. i got caught in the tnt2 trap... they only kind of open sourced it.. glx development has halted for the tnt cards because they can't get straight forward information.. the matrox g200 and g400 cards are getting very good attention from this team.. they've implemented agp ( linux kernel module to achieve this ), etc. sure the tnt2 works in linux .. but not any where near as well as it should be working. again reiterating.. don't buy any 3d cards hoping that support will get better in the future.. cause well it may not, and why do that when you could buy a cheaper card that works better now.

    ramblerambleramblewhyamihearpostingstuffon/.
  • Hopefully this means that 3dfx has given up on locking developers into their proprietary APIs. They very successfully leveraged their initial dominance of the market to get many game shops to write glide only, or primarily glide based games. Of course, no one would write a game using glide only anymore, mainly thanks to Nvidia. Here's to OpenGL as the standard for 3D graphics!
  • Of course, PNG is supposedly enjoying the rennaissance in terms of not only good, but Politically Correct graphics format. Just a reminder for those of you trying to use JPEG to aviod GIF.
    I haven't noticed a quality difference in PNG, but then again, I've neever been an imaging purist.


  • If I were to add the patient skin with realistic semi-transparence and wanted to do functional animation as well, things bet much messier, and I (would) do that in pov... The problem then becomes, okay, everybody does it with clusters, but why? is it because 3D accelerated hardware is looked at the wrong way, or is it because this is not really the main focus (a.k.a games! :)

    Well, there is people working on taking advantage of 3d hardware acceleration for computation, but for know, it's pretty much SGI related, because many things that could be called "high" end on the usual Intel world, is standard on SGIs, so, from the SGI user point of view, some of these things can be called "comodity" hardware (really fast buses, texture memory, and the extensions to support and take advantage of those)

    A side note: for hardware accelerated opengl and computation, I use IDL on NT but am waiting for a comparable solution in Linux (yep, sure do!)

    IDL is available for Linux. Real support for 3d hardware acceleration is on its way... /me is looking forward for the GLX for G400 support [openprojects.net], Matrox provides real specs so real drivers can be developed.

  • Because now people can use 3D cards on real architectures (Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS, etc.), write games all day long, play existing ones, etc.

    --
  • This is not true. The source is a full implementation of Glide3.x fully compatibile with the windows API (Its missing a few extensions). The source will even build on Windows if you grab a couple of Windows DDK/SDK files. If you take a look at the source you'll notice that you can even adjust a few symlinks to builds a fully functional non-DRI standalone version of Glide3x. However as this is the first release of Glide3x for linux there are no Glide3x programs to run. However the Glide3x documentation is provided so you can write your own Glide3x programs. Joseph Kain
  • All source RPMS (Well most) have tarballs inside them. Thats how RPM works. The build systems untars your source and follows your build instructions. In fact the DRI.spec would help you figure out how to build the stuff.
  • Yeah, but I don't have the serial number to my TNT card, so I can't download the thing. My computer is such a huge mess of wires it takes forever to get inside it to see if the number is on the card.
  • > 'd like to see the source for the complete Glide library so that my "old" Voodoo2 can also use Glide3X.

    OK, I no longer work there, but there is a released glide3x for v2 right? Why can't you use this?
  • Except that GIFs are limited to 8-bit color, which wouldn't exactly bring out the best in the screenshots. Using GIFs would also increase the file size quite a bit.

    And where exactly are the hard lines in a q3 screenshot?

  • I helped to prepare the release, mostly packaging glide, testing the release, and updating the webpage. I have not forgotten what I tarball is, I grew up using Slackware. However, as the instructions clearly state this is a prerelease and it is targetted at RedHat 6.1. If had to test on all eleven distributions on my test machine this release won't have made it out this early.

    Despite all that I know several people that have this running on Debian, using alien to convert the packages to debs. I've converted the packages to tgz files using alien as well. I've also built the entire thing from source on Slackware 7.0. Given all that I think this prerelease is in very good shape. The only major problem I've seen so far is that it won't run on Suse (The provided binaries or a build on Suse) I'll be looking into that today.

    Joseph Kain

  • For playing quake3 the currrent drivers are wonderful. This new DRI release provides several things in addition to quake3 support. The first is stability. If a glide program (and hence a program running on Mesa3D through glide) crashes it usually will not restore the 2D desktop. The DRI solutions is much better about this: it is much better at cleaning up after itself. The second new feature is rendering in a window. Now quake3 in a windows is nice but not necessary However windowed rendering is necessary for applications like Blender, or Maya. So for proper GLX support for 3D applications DRI is wonderful thing.

    Joseph Kain

  • Because the current implementation is "for development only", and that feature will be in their DRI release.
  • Correction: 3DFX has always been stingy with code. This is not the whole glide library, it's just a subset for interfacing mesa. 3Dfx has a very bad track record - lawsuits over glide clones anyone?

    Slashdot should get it together and not post headlines confusing part of glide with the whole library. This does not mean you can take full advantage of your Voodoo card with free software - not even close. In order for that to a happen, all the device drivers and the complete glide library would need to be freed.

    One step in the right direction, but 3dfx still has a long way to go before they respect the rights of users in having source code for all of it.

    Until 3fx gets a clue, it's still no good guys...

  • its not like rpm is some closed proprietary standard. If you use gmc, double click on the rpm and you can easily drag and drop the files out. Or you can use alien. or rpm2tgz. I don't understand why people begrudge redhat for being successful. Or is it less "cool" to use an OS if too many other people use it?
  • Without tweaking q3a in any way, and using the above mention DRI+glide driver, with a 1600x1200 desktop, and the standard size q3a window I get 30.2 fps on q3demo1 on a celeron 300A/450 with the slowest voodoo3 (2000).

    Can any non-3dfx card do 3d in a window with linux? Faster?
  • I checked out the webpage and I'm not sure exactly what's being offered. Is this the source to Glide, the 3D API, or is it an X server for the Voodoo cards? Or something in between? If its the former, then doesn't that mean people can port Glide to work with any 3D card? Being that I have a TNT 2, I'm a little pissed about games that require Glide.

    I'm talking more about Windows than Linux here. Normally I hate Windows just as much as (if not more than) your average Linux user does, but gaming is one area where Linux just can't compete with Windows. This is not flamebait, its a legitamite question, even in a crowd of Linux users. Remember, open source can apply to Windows stuff, even if it usually doesn't.
  • Maybe they're only doing this because of the competition? Something makes me think that they wouldn't open the source unless people stopped writing Glide-only games...

    (This is only a thought, and it may or may not reflect the truth. I do not claim that it does, it is just a thought.)

    --

  • There are differences in the internals of Glide, so you can't just use with with a V2.

    Folks, this is the first prerelease. Hang in there. There's more to come.

    - |Daryll

  • Bzzz, wrong answer, but thank you for playing.

    The FULL code to glide3x for Voodoo Banshee/Vodoo3 is included. You CAN take advantage of your Voodoo card with free software!

    The release is focused on the DRI, so if you do a make at the top of the tree, you get a DRI compatible version. If you go into the sources and change a few symbolic links (foo.c.dri to foo.c.orig) then you get a fully functional full screen version of Glide.

    Clue check, you failed...

    - |Daryll

  • It was never passed through a preprocessor. That's the way the code has always looked. (For better or for worse) It is complicated code and it does use a lot of preprocessor tricks, but it has all been included.

    - |Daryll

  • Yes, but would the full version of Glide so built support V1&V2?
  • Ooops. Wrong source tree. 3dfx didn't go through any preprocessor.

    OOPS!

    - |Daryll

  • How open are these, really? (Score:3)

    by Elvii ( 428 ) <david1975@@@comcast...net> on Wednesday November 17, 1999 @11:01PM (#1523329) Homepage
    Are these open ala Nvidia and Sblive, "Here's some code but no specs", or are the open ala Matrox g200/400, where you actually have specs and can do useful work beyond optimizing what they give you? The article was brief and didn't seem all that clear, imho...

    As I still only have a riva128, matrox's (imho) better open-ness will lead me to get a g200/400 when I do upgrade...

    David
  • If it was /just/ glide then it's no big deal.

    But from the fact that opengl can be
    implemented as a thin(ish) layer over glide
    which makes it wa-hey cool for voodoo3
    owners.

    As one previous poster mentioned, it would
    be great if 3dfx would release stuff which would
    allow the older voodoo cards to work too.
  • The glide code is under yet another source license. At first glance, it sounds DFSG-free, claiming to be GPL-ish with exceptions for code not explicitly derived from the original code. I'm not sure what they're trying for there that the lgpl doesn't cover. Porting glide to your proprietary card seems like an example.

    Here's the preamble:

    program interface (API).The license is intended to offer terms similar
    to some standard General Public Licenses designed to foster open
    standards and unrestricted accessibility to source code. Some of these
    licenses require that, as a condition of the license of the software,
    any derivative works (that is, new software which is a work containing
    the original program or a portion of it) must be available for general
    use, without restriction other than for a minor transfer fee, and that
    the source code for such derivative works must likewise be made
    available. The only restriction is that such derivative works must be
    subject to the same General Public License terms as the original work.

    This 3dfx GLIDE Source Code General Public License differs from the
    standard licenses of this type in that it does not require the entire
    derivative work to be made available under the terms of this license
    nor is the recipient required to make available the source code for
    the entire derivative work. Rather, the license is limited to only the
    identifiable portion of the derivative work that is derived from the
    licensed software. The precise terms and conditions for copying,
    distribution and modification follow.

    I noticed two obvious hitches:

    section 3.2(f) says:
    You do not make any use of the GLIDE trademark without the prior written permission of 3dfx.

    And yet, a la GPL, you must insure that all recipients receive a copy or be referred to "this License" which is defined as the "3dfx GLIDE Source Code General Public License". Hmmm.

    I'd guess this is an oversight, since they seem to be attempting to hold to the spirit of the GPL.

    Also, section 4.2 says:
    If the distribution and/or use of the Program or Derivative Works
    is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted
    interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under
    this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation
    excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in
    or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License
    incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.

    This seems to say they can take away one's right to redistribute at any time, especially since the readme lists a number of US patent numbers. This seems like a real show-stopper.

    Comments?

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