On Monday 18 February 2002 01:32, Peter Seebach wrote:
> (NetBSD 1.5ZA, on a laptop with a SavageIX chipset.)
> 
> So, I was told that there are neat OpenGL light cycle race games.  I tried
> two of them:  armagetron and gltron.  Both require SDL.  Both are *AMAZINGLY*,
> *STUNNINGLY*, slow.  (Think 2-4 fps on a 1Ghz computer.)  By contrast, glclock
> is silky-smooth, claiming to do 50+fps.
> 
> Am I barking up the wrong tree?  Is it something other than this "SDL" thing
> that's making my computer suddenly suck?
> 
> -s

Yes. As far I was able to find out, we don't do hardware acceleration under X 
very well. Does anything else using the opengl/direct rendering of your XFree 
server work at ungodly speeds? How about the gears screensaver? Is that 
super-fast? Is SDL the ONLY thing slowing OpenGL performance down?

SDL also has another problem. smpeg and the various associated libraries require
some kind of POSIX semaphores..  if I recall correctly.. that haven't been
included in NetBSD or at least properly patched in pkgsrc.. I think we do
have semaphores now (or do we?) in -current since I noticed them in GENERIC
when I last checked out -current source yesterday and rebuilt my server.

Anyway, the smpeg and various sound libs of SDL don't work so well, if at all.
Most of the cool SDL-type games I can compile and run here either have
horrendously delayed sound, or scratchy crappy sound, or no sound at all.

On the other hand, some assembly SDL demos I downloaded work beautifully! :)

-sudog