Graphics Acceleration on Linux

Enabling glx graphics acceleration on your Linux workstation

Until recently, the Linux workstation was confined to using the X windows protocol to serve (display) graphics applications. If you wanted to view OpenGL-based applications, like many of those on SGI, it was neccessary to have the Mesa graphics libraries on the SGI host. The Mesa libraries allow any X server to display OpenGL applications, but the protocol is slow. Recent developments enable the Linux display to host OpenGL-based applications. In fact it is very likely that the graphics pieces provided with your linux installation will supply hardware accelleration for your grpahics, with the default configuration. Versions 4.X of XFree86 contain the glx.so rendering module for increased graphics speed. If you are still getting slow graphics, contact me and we can try to figure out the problem.