Games depending on OpenGL and GLX - any way to test on XO with regular OLPC image?

[Kent Dahl]

On sø., 2008-06-08 at 14:16 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> The EeePC has a quite performant Intel "GMA 900" 3D accelerator, which  
> provides a fillrate of 1.3 GPixels/sec and even basic pixel shader  
> support (OpenGL 1.4). The XO-1 has an AMD "Geode" without any 3D  
> acceleration (there is some 2D accel).

Ah, I didn't know that. Explains why ppracer goes so well there, with
some minor lag. The Asus having a lower screen resolution that the XO
would also play into it. So 3D is right out.

But if there is some 2D accel, that could help on other 2D games, like
SuperTux, GCompris (which currently seems rather slow), etc,

> So hardware 3D is not an option. Software 3D is hampered by the  
> enormous resolution of 1200x900 pixels. Pseudo-3D (like in the Doom  
> engine) works quite okay, but full 3D at acceptable frame rates would  
> require a lower resolution. AMD said it should be possible to  
> configure the Geode's video scaler to provide a smaller frame buffer,  
> but nobody has adapted the X driver to support that, yet.

That sounds very interesting, since I see a lot of games being optimized
for 640x480, 800x600 (and insane stuff like 320x240). They get rather
"squished" in 1200x900, meaning any game using resolutions below 800x600
isn't worth trying ATM. (Don't want to spread short-sightedness and
squinting. :)

> A 400x300 mode scaled up by 3 to the panel resolution would be  
> awesome, and should allow nice software rendering. If such a mode  
> existed, maybe it would even make sense to ship Mesa (a software  
> OpenGL implementation) and GLUT, which would allow some OpenGL  
> programs to run unmodified.

It would also fix the old 320x240 modes as well, which is a nice,
although old-school, game resolution I just recently did the
scale-by-three thing manually for the XO in an old Ruby game I made
years ago; http://magicmaze.rubyforge.org/ </plug>

> Until then, programs requiring OpenGL will not work on the XO. And  
> even then, most will run slowly, and suck power - but having the  
> option would be nice :)

Thanks for the clarifications.

-- 
Kent Dahl <kentda at pvv.org>
http://www.pvv.org/~kentda/
-- 
Kent Dahl <kentda at pvv.org>
http://www.pvv.org/~kentda/