I have a few questions regarding linux and openGL. 1.does linux support OpenGl 1.2? 2.does nvidia provide linux detonator drivers? 3.does opengl work faster in linux?

SGI provides linux drivers for OGL for its 230 series which uses a geForce. I''ve played Quake3 on it and seems very fast although had some mouse probs.

Short answer: yes, "yes" and sometimes

1.does linux support OpenGl 1.2?

Through a lib called Mesa it does. Mesa is usually installed with most distributions (RedHat, Mandrake, Suse...)

2.does nvidia provide linux detonator drivers?

Yup. Downloadable from nvidia.com under drivers.

They are a little behind on the Windows ones, and they are not called detonator. But they work great.

3.does opengl work faster in linux?

Sometimes. Benchmarks show a very even score on Win and Linux using NVidia drivers. Sometimes Linux is faster, sometimes Windows. It depends a lot on the application, the gfx card etc

No reason not to develop for Linux/OGL platform!

Take a look at SDL - multiplatform lib for lowlevel access to audio/video hardware, threads and stuff. Works with OGL also. It is platform independant running on Win, BeOS, Linux, Amiga++++ and provides a directx like api

1) Yes, Mesa (default OpenGL clone for Linux) aims for OpenGL 1.2 complience (even with software emulation). Also, Nvidia OpenGL is 1.2.

2) Yes, the Nvidia Linux drivers are based on the same codebase as the windows drivers.

3) OpenGL speed is pretty much limited by the graphics hardware. Benchmarks I have seen using Nvidia with Quake3A seemed to show the OSes are pretty close (within 2% framerate of each other). However the Linux driver currently is a bit slower at high res (due to blitting, instead of page flipping in the driver). For details see:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/00q3/000811/linux_geforce-11.html

In short, Linux makes a fine OpenGL development platform. Last I heard, Id was going to use Linux for the new Doom development.

HeNe has many of their tutorials converted to Linux already (via GLUT or straight X ports), but you might also consider the SDL library, it provides platform independence for OpenGL (like GLUT) but is more suited to games (i.e., fast and gets out of the way as much as possible). Its also has input and sound support and other needed subsystems for fast cross-platform games as well.

I believe the Linux versions several commercial games (from http://www.lokigames.com) use SDL.

SDL applications can be compiled to run on Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS etc.

Many of the HeNe demos have been ported to SDL already, see:

http://www.libsdl.org/opengl/intro.html

The main SDL site is:

http://www.libsdl.org

I''m using the NVidia Linux drivers.

These drivers are quite difficult to get going - the catch I found was that you had to have a particular BIOS setting, that wasn''t listed in the NVidia FAQ (searching the web found it eventually).

While developing PortaLib3D I''ve noticed Linux is actually quite a bit faster than the Windows equivalent. However, I''m not sure if this is the drivers, or that GCC without optimisation is doing a better job than VC6 with it (which would surprise me). Anyway, YMMV

You can also use my library to develop cross platform OpenGL programs (more high-level than SDL - eg. shadowed model rendering, but much less mature

Good luck!

~~~
Cheers!
Brett Porter
PortaLib3D : A portable 3D game/demo libary for OpenGL