“Utah GLX is an open source implementation of SGI’s GLX
protocol, which also uses several low-level Mesa drivers for
several of today’s latest 3D accelerators. The effects of having
hardware accelerated OpenGL support in Linux are clear, and it is
helping to move Linux into the high-end graphics and gaming
markets.“
“In its third year of development, the Utah GLX project has been
traced back to the spring of 1997, but it may have existed even
earlier than that. Originally written by Steven Parker, it
eventually contained some hardware acceleration for the Matrox
Millennium line of video cards. The hardware acceleration
infrastructure of it was later improved upon by David Schmenk,
which later allowed Wittawat Yamwong to write a new driver for the
Matrox G200 video chipset when Matrox released the specifications
in the spring of 1999. While not perfect, it was able to run Quake
2 correctly. Since then, support has been added for various
chipsets, the most notable being the Matrox G400 chipset, when
Matrox released their specifications. Development received another
boost when programmer John Carmack, famous for his work in 3D
gaming, became involved and helped use his knowledge to improve
driver performance.”
“The current drivers support the Matrox G200 and G400 chipsets,
the ATI RagePro chipset (but not the Rage 128 chipset), the NVidia
Riva TNT series, the S3 ViRGE chipset, the SiS 6326 chipset, and
the built in video display for the Intel i810 chipset. The Matrox
drivers and ATI drivers are considered to be fairly stable: they
can run Quake 3 properly at various levels of performance. The S3
driver is considered to be very unstable, and the drivers that
NVIDIA provide for the TNT cards are better than the Utah code. The
Utah GLX code will only work on XFree86 versions higher than 3.3.5,
as 4.0 already has most of the features that it provides. Being
based on the Mesa 3D Graphics Libraries, it provides full API
compatibility with it, but bugs do sometimes cause graphical
glitches.”