Supported Video Cards: Difference between revisions

If you are using FlightGear with a Unix-like operating system (i.e. Linux, BSD, Solaris, SGI, etc.), check for the latest video driver that fully supports your graphics card or integrated GPU. In general, Nvidia video driver support used to be considered better than ATI and Intel support. However, this refers to the proprietary binary "blobs", which entail a few (potentially serious) issues regarding freedom and long term driver maintenance (and, therefore, card support).

 

For instance, Nvidia is known to refuse to disclose the hardware specifications needed to write a graphics driver, providing a closed binary only. Therefore, the free nouveau driver cannot support 3D acceleration, which is not good if you want to run FlightGear.

 

On the other hand, AMD now publishes hardware specifications (though not complete) and the resulting free radeon driver for ATI/AMD chipsets provides a good 3D support for many cards, even recent ones (obviously not for the newest), so it is worth to try. An excellent source to see which card families and features are supported by this driver, can be found on the Xorg Foundation website. [http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature]

 

For example, FlightGear 2.10 runs smoothly with an ATI Radeon X1950 card, using the free radeon driver version 6.14.4 (the only issue being a locally strange rendering behavior if landscape rendering is enabled).