From: Evan Martin <txs@concentric.net>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Fri, 04 Jun 1999 20:21:15 -0700

Re: Riva TNT: Accellerated Mesa drivers !!!

Jos Hulzink wrote:
> NVidia has released Mesa drivers for Linux...

Since I'm an nVidia user, I thought I'd elaborate:
nVidia has updated their X server (which supports the NV1, 128, 128ZX,
TNT,
and TNT2) to support Mesa/GLX on their 3D cards (all of the above except
the
NV1).

I have a RIVA 128, and this is what I see:

The updated X server is a bit faster: one of the window moving options
in
enlightenment no longer takes 5 seconds per frame, because of
accellerated
pattern fills.

I'm not so sure of the 3D support.
The instructions tell you to replace libMesaGL.so with their provided
libGL.so .  I tried running some of the examples included with some
GL tutorials, and didn't notice a big difference.  A few of them ran, 
and a few of them segfaulted.

The real difference with hardware GL would be speed, of course, but
it was hard to see.  I couldn't get anything to run double-buffered,
because glutCreateWindow() would terminate the program if 
glutInitDisplayMode() had been called with the GLUT_DOUBLE parameter.  
This included many of the mesa demos. :\

Also, my initial message that I was writing to this list was
lost, because the X server crashed.

(These problems are all specific to the nVidia-provided libGL.so:
All of these problems didn't occur when I was using the debian
libMesaGL.so, which is the software-only version, of course.)

I hope my problems are attributable to using binaries.
I may try using their patches and compiling mesa, x, and the glx module.

-- 
Evan Martin - txs@concentric.net - http://e.x0r.ml.org