The 02.12.10 at 10:22, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
These games, specially flight gear, require HW accel to work. If not enabled, they crawl at 1 image per second, or worse, on a 1.8 Ghz pentium IV. That usually means 3D in sax2.
About your crash, I don't know.
From what has been said, would you assume that it was 3D that was killing my system?
Well... it is a possibility. Video programming was always difficult, and it was always very easy to lock the computer. For example, the driver may need full control of the cpu for a short time, and if the program locks at that point the system could not recuperate. I don't know how it is handled that in linux; but I understand there is a big problem because some makers (like nvidia) do not release the necesary information to make open source drivers, so they either have to reverse engineer them, or use whatever driver the maker makes. I guess there are other people here that could expand on this far better than me.
Any thoughts on another application that I could try, that would use 3D (and not cost money...), that might help confirm/isolate the source of the problem?
Some have been reported on another thread, but just search for 3d in yast or pin.
Anybody know of an app that can switch between 3D and no-3D, on-the-fly?
There are some programs that might do that, but I have to read the docs to make sure. Try finding out about these: swfplayer switch2mesasoft switch2nv switch2nvidia switch2nvidia_glx switch2xf86_glx In my case, I guess switch2nv and switch2nvidia would do exactly that.
It seems to me that the 3D drivers(?) or underpinnings are constantly enabled, but are only invoked when needed, thus I can run the rest of my system and software without crashes, but when something needs 3D, it starts breaking. I mean, I've had the system up for several days running just KDE, KMail, some browsing (Opera and Konq) and office apps, with no problems.
Could be. But in the case of nvidia (the one I know) the driver is completely different: nv, whic is open, or nvidia, from the maker, and binary only. Only the second support 3d and hardware accel.
By contrast, I've killed it within 30 seconds of KDE loading, by starting Tuxracer and then exiting the game. Other times, I've had Tuxracer or one of the other games going for several minutes before things....... just stopped.
It doesn't seem to matter what other apps I might have open at the time.
Well... your crash might be due to something else completely different. Have you read the messages about barrier=none? It would apply, if you use reiserfs. There is a new kernel patch. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson