Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will increasingly become good OpenGL drivers. I have a Radeon 9200SE, which has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond the r300 driver we're not going to get squat.
Obviously, most people know this already, but it's surely getting more serious over time. OpenGL has to be the way to go, but if all your apps are GL (I don't know the names of all these things, but font rendering strikes me as an obvious beneficiary, there is a GL mozilla you can try, GNOME has some measure of GL support in Gtk+ already, etc. etc.) and you only have a MESA software renderer, that's going to be an awfully slow desktop :(
I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....
I hope this project will succeed:
But you can't tell everyone whose GNU flash animations are slow: tough! you should get an open-gl graphics card, can you? Is hardware opengl really going to be a requirement to play flash animations? What about everyone+dog with their old 2D graphics card?
Sam