new G4 towers

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 10:55 AM -0600 9/5/02, Dan Burcaw wrote:
>On x86 Linux you do have more of a choice.  Although it should be noted
>that Red Hat refuses to support the nVidia binary drivers.  There must
>be a reason for that.

There is -- they suck.  Alan Cox is probably a factor; he doesn't 
like any binary vendor drivers, and I expect he swings a lot of 
weight at RH.  But the suckage has to be a big factor too.

Some friends of mine and I are working on a 3D game for Linux in our 
spare time on evenings and weekends.  We use x86 boxes with NVidia 
cards as development platforms.

As far as we can tell, NVidia probably doesn't test much beyond 
making sure the few major commercial 3D apps for Linux such as Quake 
and Maya work well.  If you stick to them you won't have many 
problems.  But if you try to write your own GL app that uses 
different paths through the drivers, be prepared for random crashes 
where the machine is locked so hard you can't even ping it.

We've been experiencing these lockups for well over a year now, with 
many combinations of NVidia card models, driver versions, and 
motherboards.  We've not found a single combo to date that does _not_ 
crash.  They're infrequent enough to allow us to still do useful work 
on our game, but frequent enough to cause serious annoyance and much 
thankfulness for ext3 journalling.

Maybe the problem is our game.  But I believe that drivers should be 
robust enough to survive our screwups without taking down the whole 
machine.  And we have reason to believe it's not us, anyways -- for a 
while my computer was the last holdout with a 3Dfx Voodoo3, and I had 
no lockups with that machine.  When we decided to stop targetting 
3Dfx cards due to the vendor being long dead, I upgraded that machine 
to a GeForce2 MX, and it started to lock up just like the rest.

BTW Dan, I also agree with your praise for ATI -- while the 3D 
drivers for modern ATI hardware under Linux are not anything like 
mature yet, they are open source because ATI has the guts to work 
with the open source community.  I recently compiled a snapshot of 
DRI CVS on a YDL 2.3 G4 equipped with a Radeon and a BenH kernel, and 
got our game running.  Slowly, with some rendering artifacts, but it 
works and even appears to be stable.  I don't expect our game to ever 
work at all on NVidia hardware on PPC, unless NVidia seriously 
changes its Linux strategy.
-- 
Tim Seufert