Newbi question: NV's Driver installed, then?

[tokevino]

I've installed NV's Linux Driver on RedHat 8.0 succesfully.

Now, in the GNOME's displayer setting, there is a disabled option called "enable hardware 3d acceleration", and I cannot choose to enable or disable this option. However, everytime I run my UT 2003, the nVidia's logo will display for a second or so.

My questions is, is my video card's 3d accelerating mode fully enabled?

I am a Linux newbi, and II have a Hercules Geforce 2 MX.

Sorry about my spelling, if any :p

Thanks for any help!

[madmax]

Hi tokevino,

I have the same problem .....

Please change the Title to "video card's 3d accelerating mode "
:D

So help us !!!!

[bwkaz]

If you've followed the instructions in the README (and if UT2003 runs at all, rather than dying with an "S3TC support required" message or something similar), then yes, the drivers are installed and working.

The reason your GUI tool (whatever it is) is telling you that hardware rendering isn't enabled or isn't working or whatever, is probably that rather than checking the actual state of GLX (using the glXIsDirect() function), it's just looking for an uncommented Load "dri" line in your X config file. This line should not be uncommented for the nVidia drivers! -- but the GUI tool doesn't know that.

Anyway, that's my guess. It's probably partially due to the fact that RedHat doesn't support the nVidia driver at all, and partially due to the fact that every other driver requires the "dri" stuff to be loaded in order to have hardware support. So most GUI config tools just check for "dri", rather than doing the real check by calling the glXIsDirect() function.

[tokevino]

As I mentioned, I am running RH8.0, so I have to follow a "special" way (just learnt it from this forums, see top 4 of the forum posts) to install the NV driver, including rebuilding rpms, etc.

Is this going to make sure my hardware 3D acceleration work?

BTW, is OpenGL the only 3D API supported by Linux? and IS UT2003 use GL under linux?

Thanks!:D

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by tokevino
As I mentioned, I am running RH8.0, so I have to follow a "special" way (just learnt it from this forums, see top 4 of the forum posts) to install the NV driver, including rebuilding rpms, etc. Yep. You can either rebuild the RPMs yourself, or use the .tar.gz drivers.

Is this going to make sure my hardware 3D acceleration work?Well... it should. You can always look at glxinfo | grep -i direct -- if it says something like "direct rendering: yes", then you're using hardware 3D. You can also look through the output of xdpyinfo, specifically the list of supported extensions. Make sure GLX, NV-CONTROL, NV-GLX, and NVIDIA-GLX are listed. There's also a third test -- run glxgears. You'll see a small window with 3 gears in it pop up, and the gears will start spinning. Every 5 seconds it will print (to the console or terminal emulator you started it from) some benchmark info. Generally, and of course it depends on the video card as well, anything less than about 300-500 FPS means your hardware GL isn't being used.

BTW, is OpenGL the only 3D API supported by Linux? and IS UT2003 use GL under linux? As far as I know, yes it's the only API. It's completely open, free, unpatented (AFAIK), etc., so there really isn't any reason to use a second API.

Yes, UT2k3 is using OpenGL. It's also using SDL, which is a layer on top of stuff like OpenGL, Ogg and Vorbis (for the game audio), networking, and a bunch of other things. OpenGL does the same sort of thing as Direct3D, and SDL does the same sort of thing as the entire DirectX package, if you want to think of it that way.

[tokevino]

Thank you for all the information. They are very helpful! And my q3a fps is better than under win32system.:D