X and Eye Candy

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 04:09:16PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I had heard of this.  I was tempted, partly for the silly reason that
> I was forced to buy a very high-end video card (nVidia 7800GTX) and
> have had no use for what makes it so expensive: 3d performance.  In
> particular, I'm using the open source driver that cannot touch all
> those pipes and shaders and thingees.
> 
> (Why did I buy this card?  Because my monitor requires "dual link" DVI
> to drive it.  The nVidia 7800GT was the cheapest nVidia card that
> would do the job (I got a GTX instead for incidental reasons).  I had
> tried an ATI x1300 at less than a third of the cost (and watts) but
> there is no Linux driver for the ATI x1000 series cards.)

I guess the 7600GT will be the new cheaper option for dual link, and
7900 will be a 2x dual link option (but expensive).

I don't know of any cheap dual link cards either though. :)

> I have not as yet downloaded Kororaa because I haven't thought of any
> actual benefit from the candy.  Desktops on the face of a cube sound
> cute but not helpful (how does that work when my desktop isn't
> square?).  But this is only based on thinking about the thing.

I suspect it just warps things a bit.  I can't think of any way it is
helpful.  Eyecandy usually isn't.

> Evan: what does Koraraa do for you?  Why do you find it a worthwhile
> experience?
> 
> 
> Some things about x-over-GL have me concerned:
> 
> - the only decent 3d drivers for Linux are proprietary.  Even those
>   don't actually work right with Xgl (maybe that has changed; see
>   http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl and
>   http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL#Prerequisites).  On the other hand,
>   only certain middle-aged ATI cards work for AIGLX (see
>   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx).

That is certainly an annoying problem.  I hope someday some company will
be willing to release enough specs for people to write 3D open source
drivers for decent 3D hardware.  The ATI vs. nVidia 3D games war on
Windows does not seem to be heading that direction any time soon though.

> - (SuSE's) Xgl apparently precludes DRI applications
> 
> - (Red Hat's) aiglx seems to require the window manager to do the
>   magic.  Perhaps only one window manager (Metacity) will be allowed.

No, it seems the composit extension in either design should work with
any window manager that uses that extension.  Both Xgl and aiglx are
extensions to X that implement accaleration for this feature.  At least
that is my understanding.  SuSE decided to make a completely new x
server, while redhat decided to make it a module for X.org and should
hence support any other feature X.org does, while the Xgl option only
does whatever they have implemented so far in their X server.

> I may have this wrong -- I've never tried any of these things.

Len Sorensen
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