Tuesday, August 29, 2006

How to render using Mesa

It is remarkable hard to get your OpenGL software to avoid using hardware acceleration. I required this to test some glChess bugs.

Under a DRI system you disable DRI by quoting out the Load "dri" line in the Modules section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. After restarting X everything 3D should be slow.

Under an annoying non-standard system (i.e. nVidia) I believe you can link your C program using something like -lGLMesa. However you are royally screwed if you use something like the Python bindings. Then you would have to do some recompiling/magic relinking to make it all work.

2 comments:

Squirk said...

What about using something like the following?

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGLMesa.so glchess

Robert Ancell said...

Ah good I was hoping you'd write in with the correct form...