| Re: Object graphics under Linux: are they supposed to be that slow? [message #29056 is a reply to message #29053] |
Mon, 28 January 2002 12:38   |
nobody@nowhere.com (S
Messages: 55
Registered: July 2001
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Member |
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Hi Mark:
I'm not sure I've the answer for you, but I suspect that the big difference
is in the graphics subsystem, the windows more than likely supporting the
hardware acceleration and Linux (XFree I'm assuming) not. You didn't mention
what version of X you were using. Here's from the XFree site about hardware
acceleration support of the latest XFree release:
4.2.0:
Support (accelerated) for the Intel i740 is provided by the "i740" driver,
and support for the Intel i810 (including i810-dc100 and i810e), i815, and i830
is provided by the "i810" driver. The "i810" driver is currently supported only
on Linux and FreeBSD (4.1 and later), and requires AGP GART kernel support.
So you might check your kernel and see if it has this compiled in by doing
ksyms -m, you should see something about agpgart appear in the output, if
you don't you probably need to compile a kernel with support for this. If
you do, you might check the output of XFree to verify that it is using the
acceleration, if you're kernel supports it. On my system, this is spewed to
/var/log/xdm-error.log (I use xdm, you probably do too). My Linux box uses
an Nvidia chip and the accelerated-driver is proprietary and buggy, so I've
just forgone any acceleration on my system.
I don't know what your reasons for moving to Linux were, but if you want
accelerated graphics (Open GL / DRI), that's on the bleeding edge of Linux.
I've been a Linux user since 1995 and I think it has many advantages, but
this is an admitted weakness. I'd be interested to hear what other users
say about this, and how well the software accelerated Open GL provided by
RSI with IDL for Linux works on other systems.
On Mon, 28 Jan 2002 12:23:58 +1300,
Mark Hadfield <m.hadfield@niwa.co.nz> wrote:
> Hi guys
>
> I have recently been considering a switch to from Windows to Linux for
> various reasons that I won't go into here. I have set up a dual-boot system
> on my PC and, as of today I have IDL running on both OSes. I'm afraid it's
> been a disappointment. I mean, I've used IDLDE on another Unix system so I
> wasn't expecting too much of it. (I planned to use IDLWAVE in any case). But
> object graphics rendering on the Linux side is unusably slow! For example I
> have an object-graphics animation example program that presents a series of
> 25 x 25 IDLgrSurface objects. It runs along at a tolerable 15 frames per
> second on Windows but barely manages 2 frames per second under Linux. Using
> software rendering on Linux seems to speed things up slightly, but not much.
>
> The PC has a Pentium 3 800 Mhz processor with an Intel 815 built-in graphics
> controller. I run 16 colours, 1280 x 1024 on both OSes. The Windows OS is
> Windows 2000 and the Linux one is Redhat 7.2 (kernel 2.4.7-10). The system
> has oodles of RAM and disk space.
>
> Is there anything I can do to improve OG performance under Linux?
>
> ---
> Mark Hadfield
> m.hadfield@niwa.co.nz http://katipo.niwa.co.nz/~hadfield
> National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
>
>
>
--
Steve S.
steve@NOSPAMmailaps.org
remove NOSPAM before replying
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