On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 11:37:34PM -0700, Dave King wrote:
> This is not meant to start a us verses them os war. What I am hoping is that
> some of you may be heavier users and hopefully multi os users of either
> Linux or windows. I use xp on my laptop and slackware on my desktop however
> I don't use the slack box for gaming which is why I have no base line for
> this.
> 
> I have a project just starting and during one of our meetings we discussed
> which base os would be best to use. This is a graphics intensive application
> as well as having a large amount of sensor and i/o stuff going on. At last
> count
> we were up to 30 some odd pic's in the project.
> 
> The discussion about graphics came up as it was suggested that windows
> actually
> had better graphics abilities than x11 based versions. I know some of the
> first person
> shooter/stress relief have come out in both pc and nix versions. Not having
> used the
> nix version I have no direct reference. I believe and said that I thought
> the Nix version
> was faster but no one was sure. Hence this post. Can anyone post any usable
> tests or
> information?

Well ID Software is unusual for releasing Linux versions of it's various
games. I've played various versions of Quake on Linux before, seemed
plenty fast and smooth. Linux supports OpenGL along with hardware
accelleration just fine. It's support for video cards is a little bit
more limited than windows, but sounds like this is a professional
project with a decent budget, in which case picking one of the video
cards that does work on Linux won't really be an issue. Nvidia and ATI
both release Linux drivers for their top of the line cards.

Basically, my advice is if you are comfortable with Linux, use it. Minor
differences in graphics performence can always be fixed with minor
differences in hardware budget. Your programming time is probably way
more expensive.

Anyway, Linux does have the potential for very good real-time
responsiveness, both hard and soft real time. At my "day job" I do Linux
audio work, stuff like recording multiple channels of high quality audio
at once. Works fine, no drop outs or anything. I also have Linux
controlling my CNC milling machine via the EMC software, that's using
the hard real time extensions. Works fine.

That said, if hard-real time is something you want, check if the video
drivers for your graphics will work with real-time Linux.

-- 
pete@petertodd.ca http://www.petertodd.ca
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