Enemy Territory

[Karel J. Bosschaart]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 10:21:34AM -0700, Robin Schoonover wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2003 10:11:30 +0100, "Karel J. Bosschaart"
> <K.J.Bosschaart at tue.nl> wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 10:55:38PM +0100, Robin Schoonover wrote:
> > > 
> > > On a slightly related note, I've been trying to run some of the linux
> > > loki demos under FreeBSD.  All work (plus heretic II, which has
> > > software rendering), except the ones labeled "3d Acceleration".  The
> > > ones labeled "3d Acceleration" tend to crash X.
> > > 
> > > One thing I've noticed is when X is started it displays:
> > > (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to load GLX

This is a serious problem that should be fixed if you want to use
3d-acceleration. My log (on 5.1-current) shows

(II) LoadModule: "glx"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libglx.so
(II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
        compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.4365
        Module class: XFree86 Server Extension
        ABI class: XFree86 Server Extension, version 0.1
(II) Loading extension GLX
(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"

> > > It appears to be finding the GLX stuff, but when it tries to load it,
> > > it can't.  If it helps any, I have a 'GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X'.

Sorry, I don't know why it is not loading :-(. If you have the line
'Load "dri"' in your XF86Config, comment it out. It is not needed and
might cause trouble. I suppose you have the kernel module nvidia.ko
loaded? 
You can test direct rendering by typing 'glxinfo'. It should show 
(among a lot of other stuff): direct rendering: Yes.
To see the performance, try 'glxgears'. My machine is doing ~3900 FPS
on -stable (using nvidia agp), ~2800 FPS on -current (using FreeBSD agp,
nvidia agp does not work on this machine under -current). I guess the
debugging stuff in -current might cause some slowdown. Also getting
lot of stuff on the console like this:
exclusive sleep mutex dev.mtx_api r = 0 (0xc4abb98c) locked @ /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver/work/NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-1.0-4365/src/nvidia_subr.c:753

> I haven't been much of a gamer since a virus wiped the windows box I was
> using a couple years ago, and that kinda turned me away from windows.  Then
> I used FreeBSD on an old (formerly dos) machine, and there wasn't really
> any hard drive space for anything, including games.
> 
> Now that I have a reasonably new computer (running FreeBSD of course), I
> decided to try a few games.  It didn't take me long to find the loki demo
> stuff.
>
Have a look at http://www.icculus.org . It's the most extensive list
of Linux games I know off, including useful links.

> > Hardware: Athlon 1.4 GHz, Asus A7M266, 512 MB RAM, GeForce4 Ti 4200
> > 128MB, onboa rd sound CMI8738.
> > OS      : FreeBSD 4.x (currently 4.9-PRERELEASE)
> 
> Here is where we are really different.  I'm running 5.1 (and this means I
> won't be saddened if things don't work, since I knew things like this might
> happened when I installed it).  I have an Athlon 2 GHz, 512 MB ram,
> GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X, and for sound, I have 'CMI9739'.
>
Once you succeed in running direct rendering, I expect games will also
run in -current. I have a dual-boot setup with -stable and -current and
shared my games partition. I didn't try them all in -current, but I
succeeded running Quake3 and UT2003, although UT2003 feels considerably 
slower than in -stable. I plan to do the same test on -current with
all my games installed but don't know when :-/.
I don't know what performance one should expect with a MX card, I bought
a Ti version since these are faster for gaming.

> [snip list]
> 
> Bizarre, Alien Crossfire seems to have written over Alpha Centauri, so I
> can't really test the sound for Alpha Centauri until I deinstall Alien
> Crossfire and reinstall Alpha Centauri.  Soldier of Fortune, Myth II:
> Soulblighter and Descent 3 all require 3d accel...
>
Reason I included sound info is that for a long time there were these
sound lags which I worked around by purchasing OSS. However, OSS does not 
work for mmap'ed sound (Quake3 and all derivatives such as ET) so I
ended up switching between the two. Currently, only two of the games
(Rune and SoF) require OSS, so I'm mostly running pcm again. 
For the records, mmap'ed sound was also broken in FreeBSD for quite a 
while, around 4.2 IIRC.

Generally, I'm happy with gaming performance in FreeBSD but I'm more
of an occasional gamer than hardcore, and consider it a nice challenge
to run them on FreeBSD ;-). It *does* add quite some instability,
unfortunately, due to the beta-nature of the nvidia-drivers, but my
experience is that once a game is started up it rarely crashes. I
haven't checked out DRI for a long time (since replacing my Matrox 
G400 by Geforce4 about one year ago).

Don't forget to check out the nvidia-driver FAQ:
http://www.soulwax.net/nvidia/faq.shtml

Hm, Can't find info about __GL_SINGLE_THREADED=1 there (maybe 
overlooking), but anyway you need to set it for most (if not all) 
Linux games to run succesfully.

Good luck,
Karel.