3D in Linux

I've recently taken an interest in 3D graphics on Linux. I've known for a few months that I'd eventually get into this because my university Honours project requires some 3D interactive grahpics. From playing 3D games in Windows, I knew that my system was more than capable of rendering cool 3D graphics very quickly. having used nothing but Linux on it since some time last year (apart from one LAN party) I decided to get all the nice 3D stuff working in Linux.

Tux Racer was the obvious place to start. Using the graphics drivers that Red Hat 7.2 chose for me when I installed it, Tux Racer was unplayably slow. Malcolm pointed out to me that there were new NVidia drivers available for Linux, so I downloaded them...

• NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-2313.i386.rpm
• NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2313.rh72smp.athlon.rpm

...you'll need different ones from NVidia's site if you're not running RedHat 7.2 on a dual processor Athlon. After installing these drivers there was a huge increase in OpenGL performance. Tux racer rocks! I also had Unreal Tournament installed which was always really slow in Linux, but it's now as quick as the Windows version and runs happily at 1280x960 with 32-bit colour (Screenshot showing UT running in a Window).

Enough of the games. After that I began to get some real work done. Installing java3D was the first thing I did.

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