Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 14:45:29 -0400 (EDT) From: <joeo@cracktown.com> To: Robert Giden <gidenr@cwu.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: OpenGL on FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.04.10006191422161.30396-100000@ra.nks.net> In-Reply-To: <394E6320.E77DBC0C@cwu.edu>
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OpenGL is an API supported by various bits'n'pieces some of it software only, some that can take advantage of 3d accelerator cards on the the PC environment. Traditionally FreeBSD has used Mesa with X11 (look in /usr/ports/graphics/Mesa3). Mesa is not officially OpenGL compliant, since no one has paid for conformance testing yet. This is a software only "rendering" solution and in most cases is fairly slow. A few of the X server vendors also have official opengl libraries available. Once again these are software renderers, but they are offically "OpenGL". In the last year's time though there have been some breakthroughs regarding 3D hardware accelerated support for the free unixlike os's. Most of them build on top of the Mesa graphics library so they can't be called OpenGL, but they work for a range of apps that Mesa supports. The easiest to install is the "Utah-GLX" stuff, which is available in the "ports" tree, check http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net/ for accelerator cards it should support. There is support in Mesa for having it pass stuff down to "glide" (the 3DFx library that supports vodoo cards). I'm not aware if getting this working under freebsd has been documented anywhere. Some information may be available at http://mesa3d.sourceforge.net/ and http://glide.sourceforge.net/ There is also work being done to make sure the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) supports some 3d cards on FreeBSD (http://dri.sourceforge.net/). Currently it should support the voodoo3 cards and possibly the Matrox G400 cards. Once again documentation to getting this built and working for FreeBSD doesn't really exist. Editorial note; If voting with dollars you should probably look at either the 3dfx, matrox or ATI hardware, since these companies were the first to actually make documentation available to the opensource 3d hardware accelerated Mesa efforts. On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Robert Giden wrote: > Can OpenGL by used on FreeBSD? > > Robert Giden > Central Wash. Univ. > <gidenr@cwu.edu> > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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