Help building/running SDL/OpenGL code

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 09:57:57PM +0200, Richard Mace wrote:
> In the end, as a last resort, I de-installed the nvidia driver and started X 
> with an empty /etc/X11/xorg.conf (which presumably loads the "nv" driver). I 
> re-built my code and it runs, albeit without the smoothest of graphics. 

On a recent core2 duo or quad, even software rendering isn't that bad.
 
> I guess that that proves that the problem lies with the NVIDIA driver and its 
> inter-relationship with the Mesa libraries, which one has to use if one builds 
> one's own "OpenGL" programs.

Yes.

> It is a pity that FreeBSD has not sorted that out, but I hasten to add that
> I'm new to FBSD and it could be my error.

It was nvidia's decision to drop support for older cards from their recent
drivers. Nothing that the FreeBSD project can do about that.

> It does beg the question, though, how one would develop OpenGL apps on FBSD? 
> I'll revisit this soon, after some careful googling.

Get a card that is well-supported by the drivers in the FreeBSD kernel and
Xorg/Mesa. Currently that means Intel's on-board graphics or boards with
ATI/AMD radeon chips, except for the latest chips. AMD released docs for those
chips some months ago, and the drivers for accellerated 3D are still evolving.

Accellerated 3D works fine on my Radeon X1650 equipped card with the
xf86-video-ati driver and the drm.ko and radeon.ko kernel modules.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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