OpenGL development on FreeBSD

[Miguel Mendez]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 17:10:26 -0700
Henrik W Lund <henrik.w.lund at broadpark.no> wrote:

Hi,

> Having hacked some OpenGL on FreeBSD myself, I found www.opengl.org to
> 
> be helpful (the obvious one, perhaps), as well as NeHe's tutorials
> over on nehe.gamedev.net

Yes, those tutorials are excellent. Kilgard's `OpenGL programming for
the X Window System' also makes a good start if you prefer dead tree
documentation, although the Motif stuff is not that useful these days,
but the basics remain the same.
 
> Basically, any stuff that's valid for Linux, is also valid for
> FreeBSD. The OpenGL API is identical (and comes installed with X), the
> only thing that might be different is the placement of libraries and
> headers, but this is handled during compile-time anyways. The other
> thing is hardware acceleration. I'm fuzzy on this, but my impression
> is that this is somewhat non-existent on FreeBSD. The only exception
> quite possibly being the NVIDIA drivers.

I'd say FreeBSD is almost on par with Linux with regards to 3D hardware
acceleration, the exception being high end ATi cards which only work
with ATi's closed source drivers. All cards supported by the DRI open
source drivers work fine in FreeBSD. I haven't noticed performance
difference between Arch Linux and FreeBSD 5.3 when it comes to OpenGL
apps. Ironically, my little SDL benchmarks performed better on the BSDs,
even when one of the CPUs was busy. Could be a scheduler side effect,
not sure.

> If he's porting from Linux, my guess is that he's got a fairly easy
> job ahead of him. If he's porting from Windows, that's going to pose a
> lot more work. Also, he'll need to use one of the appropriate
> libraries (GLUT or SDL) unless he wants to code directly atop libX11
> *shudder*.

All modern toolkits allow integration with OpenGL these days, be it SDL
or GTK+/Qt if you need something more feature rich. I see little reason
not to use them.

Just my $0.02
-- 
	Miguel Mendez <flynn at energyhq.es.eu.org>
	http://www.energyhq.es.eu.org
	PGP Key: 0xDC8514F1
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