Blender speeds under Linux and Windows

sausage · Post by **sausage** » Fri May 23, 2003 6:07 am

Being a growing linux fan and learner, and having used Blender under windows for a number of years now, I notice that having finally installed Blender under Redhat linux 9, that the running speed of Blender is far superior under windows and slower under linux.

Both OSs are installed under the same hardware box.

I would like to know if anyone can point out why this is the case. I do realise this is more a graphics system related question as opposed to Blender specific, but this is the tool I want to use the most under linux and finally move further away from windows.

Is perhaps OpenGL more advanced under the windows GDI than under Xfree86? Why is windows faster graphically? Oh by the way, I dumped the metacity window manager because it runs like a slug and went back to sawfish which is significantly faster, but Blender is still slower here than under windows.

ideasman · Post by **ideasman** » Fri May 23, 2003 10:02 am

I run linux and blender and have no speed problems at all.

Mabe your /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 is the Mesa software GL lib. When I installed Mesa, it installed over the nvidia GL lib and blender did not run as fast.

Mats78 · Post by **Mats78** » Fri May 23, 2003 10:40 am

I'd say skip Mesa

The only way blender works for me is to use the latest display drivers. That is NVidia in my case and my guess is these take care of OpenGL on my comp. I know nothing about Mesa, haven't ever bothered installing that.

Regards,
Mats

steve343 · Post by **steve343** » Fri May 23, 2003 12:50 pm

try compiling it for your system should run faster then. Unless you already done that.

what is spacifically slow the open gl preview the rendering? both os's have different strengths.

leinad13 · Post by **leinad13** » Fri May 23, 2003 1:46 pm

I find when i run Blender on Mandrake 9, its just as fast if not faster to use, and the rendering is phenomenally faster for my under linux.

Sorry for not being able to help out.

IoN_PuLse · Post by **IoN_PuLse** » Fri May 23, 2003 5:27 pm

What video card you do have? In every experience I've had, Blender is MUCH faster than windows (which is already quick) under linux, if you have the accelerated drivers installed. This goes for windows as well, either will run poorly if they don't have accelerated drivers.

Also are you using the static or dynamic release for linux?

cwguy · Post by **cwguy** » Sun May 25, 2003 6:48 pm

In other words, if you had a 3d card that could be accelerated and you got the correct drivers for windows but not linux then windows would obviously be faster, correct? Get the 3d accelerated driver for linux and it should go just as fast as windows, if not faster.

cwguy

kAinStein · Post by **kAinStein** » Sun May 25, 2003 7:13 pm

cwguy wrote:In other words, if you had a 3d card that could be accelerated and you got the correct drivers for windows but not linux then windows would obviously be faster, correct? Get the 3d accelerated driver for linux and it should go just as fast as windows, if not faster.

cwguy

Correct.

elam · Post by **elam** » Sun May 25, 2003 9:19 pm

Open up a shell window and type 'glxinfo | grep dri'
or simply type g'glxinfo' and look for the words dri.

Use of dri is required for 3d acceleration. If it's not being used, blender will be slow.

IoN_PuLse · Post by **IoN_PuLse** » Mon May 26, 2003 12:10 am

Actually you are recommended to disable dri if you are using the accelerated NVIDIA drivers. Please read about it here: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux ... README.txt

sausage · Post by **sausage** » Mon May 26, 2003 3:15 am

Hi Guys, thanks for all the suggestions so far. I'll look into this Mesa OpenGl thing.

I'm actually running it on slightly older hardware. The video card is an S3 Virge GX MkII so I have the latest linux driver set for that card that was included in the red hat 9 distribution. So no accelerated NVidia hardware here.

I find that interface in Blender is slow when rotating the working grid, and very slow painting it's menus. If I open a menu or bring up the hotbox, you can see a triangle painted, a second triange to make up a square, then finally all the menu items painted down the page.

Of course, nice and slick in Windows.

I do plan to buy an Geoforce later in the year, but I am happy with it's windows performance, but want the same under the current system under linux.

IoN_PuLse · Post by **IoN_PuLse** » Mon May 26, 2003 4:42 am

I guess look into Mesa then, or make sure you have the latest XFree86 because I think the newest contains it's own drivers for cards, and it might have one for yours.

dreamerv3 · Post by **dreamerv3** » Mon May 26, 2003 6:11 am

your running software emulation my friend and that is the reason why you're seeing such a dramatic slow down.

The reason you're seeing the menus getting painted is because bldner is window manager and widget set independant it uses opengl for all display functions, hence mesa (software emulation of opengl) will slow your menus down.

linux 3d driver support is notorious among manufacturers of 3d hardware and your virge chip set simply has no drivers under linux.

Its not linux its the hardware manufacturers and only a higher linux user polulation can convince them to write 3d drivers for linux.

Nvidia alone is really making a paradigm shift by providing linux drivers and this is directly attributed to hollywoods' adoption of linux for their infrastructure.

Funny how a trickle in the mountains of entertainment can turn into a river of user migration on the desktop.

Get an Nvidia or ATI (recent as in 8500+) and you'll see blazing speed in blender.

IoN_PuLse · Post by **IoN_PuLse** » Mon May 26, 2003 5:23 pm

I don't think that S3 wrote anything "accelerated" for Windows, but take a look here: http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/4.3.0/s3virge1.html#1

XFree86 has built-in support for many cards so if you have configured it correctly (and have the latest version) it "should" work...

sausage · Post by **sausage** » Tue May 27, 2003 2:45 am

Yep, I did a lot of reading and playing around yesterday. There are linux drivers "S3Virge". I also included a lot of my card's specific driver options into X86Config with slight improvement to the desktop usage, but not in Blender/OpenGL. General Linux usgae is quite good around the desktop and it plays back AVI & MPEG files very nicely so the card output is broad enough.

So I will look up more on the OpenGL side of things and see if it can be improved.

Thanks everyone for helping me to think in the right direction. I've learned a more about the system.

Still, it does make an interesting point. My Virge card was a commonly used card around 4 years ago, and noone seemed to have any complaints about the speed of blender's opengl use under linux in those days... so I believe there must be a forgotten bottleneck somewhere. If Mesa is just an emulation of OpenGL there must be a better version.

If I make any progress, I'll post it here for others.