I just put in an old TNT2 card into a budget system and was very suprised by how well some 3d stuff was running. It is an old card but a damn good one.
ATI''s site did not say their linux drivers did not support hardware acceleration. I would asume if they give you the driver that it is complete.
You mentioned making a 2D cross platform game. I''ve had trouble getting good 2D prefomance underlinux. I tried using SDL and under linux and the thing crawls. I''m sure there is a better way of doing it but It would be less cross plat freindly I''d guess. You may end up needing to use OpenGL for anything, which means you need the 3D acceleration working.

quote: Original post by Goober King
ATI''s site did not say their linux drivers did not support hardware acceleration. I would asume if they give you the driver that it is complete.

ATI''s closed drivers offer very little over the open drivers (if anything). Both do not support 100% of the features of the ATI cards, but they''re good enough to use in general (3D acceleration is supported, for one). The open drivers were based on hardware information that ATI at one point gave to the open source community. The ATI open drivers (I don''t know about the closed ones) are still improving at a decent rate. I''d personally stick with the open ones, since closed drivers are a pain compared to open ones.

NVidia''s drivers are at least as fast as their Windows drivers, and support all of the features of their cards. NVidia has not released any hardware information about the 3D features of their cards, so no open drivers can be written.

The NVidia TNT 2 was a great card for its time (it''s the first card I bought for myself when I built my first machine ). I gave my TNT 2 to my sister a long time ago, she still uses it.

I haven''t had any problems with SDL''s 2D speed in Linux. If your X environment or SDL isn''t setup properly, then 2D speed may be lacking.

Stuff that has been answered already at least partly:
Distro: Doesn''t matter. If you want easy try Red Hat, SuSE, or Mandrake. If you want lower level try Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware.

Compiler: GCC, of course (version 3.x preferably).

Distro Compatibility: The source will be compatible. Binaries will be compatible as long as the glibc version you link against is available and you don''t use a different C++ ABI (if you don''t use any C++ libraries besides the standard library, this is not a problem).

Books: Someone has already mentioned the free book Programming Linux Games. I have not read it, but the topics it covers sound like it would suit you.

Thanks to all of you for the replies! I´ve installed the Suse distro, since I failed to install Caldera OpenLinux, which was included with the book I bought: "Linux Demistified". So far, I´m learning how to use KDE. I have some pages left until the shell´s chapters. I haven´t searched on the Internet for my ATI card´s drivers (it´s a Radeon 9100 128 MB DDR), but I´m sure I´ll find them.

Once again, thanks for all the replies! As I said on an earlier post, you´ll see me quite often here from now on!

--Ignacio Liverotti
iliverotti@hotmail.com