I've seen that link before, there was nothing ever really wrong with it. 

Someone mentioned the Linux tux racer game. I have seen it running on a Banshee and it looked horrible, and very slowly. I don't know why, as when comparing this small game with Quake3 or NFS5 it is clear that the last two stress much more the graphic card. Anyway I am inclined to be against the person that said that the only videocard that run Tux Racer at decent framerates was a Geforce. I've seen it running very well on a Radeon 9000.

One way or another Linux drivers and support are very scarce now. If the situation will change in the future, it's unknown. However, more important is the lack of a unified and singular accelerated graphics instruction set in Linux. You don't have something like DirectX, that every card should acheve a certain compatibility. Without that we can't compare Windows an Linux in a normal way. That is their major problem, as games is the biggest and most profitable industry out there, which is mainly supporting and demanding faster CPU and GPU.

An alternative to 3dfx. I don't know. These days drivers are the least well and carefully designed pieces. I now that a good or a bad set of drivers can make quite a difference.

Perhaps...
Look at Tux racer. Is there any reason why it shows so strange looking textures and an appaling framerate on a Banshee? On Windows you see NFS5 or Quake running much faster and those are more complex. Can it have a connection with drivers optimisations? Perhaps, or maybe more than that...

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Ye, perhaps! Or perhaps you know why, mr knows-everything!

Geez, I'm tired of people like you: you really like adding sheeps and cows together, don't ya? You always compare one game on a system/platform with another game on a different system/platform!

The answer is: I dunno why TuxRacer doesn't perform well, cos I haven't tested it!

I will augment your common-knowledge a bit and tell ya that the TDFX DRI driver has been surpassed (in both features and performance) by the original Glide driver -- the one found in MesaFX. That is, if you can make the difference... As for other HW, I cannot make any assertion... perhaps lack of cooperation from IHVs. nVidia and/or ATI haven't disclosed sourcecode yet!

Your point was:
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And I replied to it. I never mentioned Tux! And if you're not tired lerning for today, I shall augment your common-knowledge even further: DRI is opensource and maintained on a volunteer basis. When BeyondDreams makes it to the top and smash down Microsoft with some secret plans, keep TungstenGraphics & co. in mind! Maybe fund them to develop their wonderful tools in such a manner to satisfy your needs.

Example: John Carmack of idSoftware donated 10000$ for Mesa. Brian Paul thought the best person to deserve them was Keith Whithwell and redirected them to him.

PS: DenisF is right! DRI switches to pure SW if it can't initialize something. The best way to test is glxinfo, glxgears. Some important environment variables: LIBGL_DEBUG (if memory serves). Useful utilities: ldd (to check the ELF chain).

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hey, how about actually reading my post before you go off on some lame rampage about it? My card, a GF2 GTS, is running in a P2 333 w/128mb SDRAM on Red Hat 9, and I mainly use Gnome, if it matters. When I tried running the game the first time, on the driver included with RH9, it ran like shit, even the menus were like .5fps. So I installed the Nvidia Forceware Linux drivers, and the game was playable, even better than my V5/P2 350, when that was running the same OS.

Also, you can't argue with the fact that Nvidia''s support of linux users is better. Check out their forums here, and you will note an entire section dedicated to Linux and Linux drivers. Where are ATI's support forums? I'll answer that for you: they don't exist.  And besides, I never even mentioned ATI in my original post, I was referring to the fact that better, updated drivers existed than those that came with the OS, because when I was using the Voodoo 5, MesaFX wasn't out yet, and I didn't know about Mesa itself.

hey ya, thanks for reading James, and i agree w/ the Geforce2 thingy: mine also still runs games like Halo @ 40fps /Thunderbird 1.4GHz & 1GB RAM. bet that's because this ol' directx7 card can't perform all the shaders (since it has no pixel shaders & only vertex shaders 1.1) -> no acceleration, no performance hit in this respect (i mean e.g. shadows done by pixel shaders can't be activated in Halo on this card, so there's more space for other rendering etc.)
@ Daniel: i'm amazed about the john carmack story you mentioned! anyway, great work!

*g*

Yes, that was a true Classic

What a luck we have people to say: "Oh, good image is more than necessary"... News, right? By the way, this is pretty useless talking and very off topic, so we shall rather stick to the point.