Re: [Fresco-devel] 3D acceleration for nVidia cards under Fresco

Nick Lewycky wrote:

>> X) in order to get 3D acceleration for Fresco via SDL under Linux. I 
>> know
>> that the nVidia OpenGL library (which is hardware accelerated) is tied
>> to the nVidia Linux kernel module. Is there a way to get Fresco to
>> load the nVidia Linux kernel module (nvidia.o) in order to access
>> graphic cards direclty?
>
 From what I understand:

Maybe. But you would basically have to re-implement the whole nvidia 
opengl library, and that's substantial effort. You probably know how 
much time nvidia invests into driver development and how much speed 
improvements they sometimes get out of that work. Re-implementing the 
OpenGL library would essentially mean to have to do all that work by 
ourselves, without intimate knowledge of the hardware.

Maybe it would give quite some speed improvements, because we could 
drive the hardware the way that's optimal for Fresco, but I don't think 
it's worth it unless Fresco has a substantial userbase (millions) and 
nvidia still has the same market share.

So, in practice, "nVidia is X specific at the moment". ;-)

>> Or is the nVidia Linux kernel module X specfic?
>
> It's X specific. It needs to link against X. It makes calls to XFree86 
> functions.

The kernel module? I don't see it including any X headers.
The OpenGL library, yes.

Kind greetings,

Ben