Systems Supported

Mesa was originally designed for Unix/X11 systems and is still best supported on those systems. All you need is an ANSI C compiler and the X development environment to use Mesa. Others have contributed drivers for the Amiga, Apple Macintosh, BeOS, NeXT, OS/2, MS-DOS, VMS, Windows 9x/NT, and Direct3D. See the README file included with the Mesa distribution for more details.

The standard Mesa distribution only supports software-based rendering, with the exception of the 3Dfx Glide driver. Information about other hardware support follows.

• DRI-based hardware support for 3dfx, Intel, Matrox, ATI on Linux

The DRI architecture, originally developed by Precision Insight, Inc. uses Mesa and provides hardware acceleration for a number of popular chipsets.

The DRI is part of XFree86 4.0 and later.

If you download and install XFree86 4.x you do not need to install Mesa separately. All the important parts of Mesa will be installed with the rest of XFree86.

• 3dfx Voodoo1, Voodoo2, Voodoo Rush, Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo3

All cards based on these chipsets should work with Linux and Windows 95 via 3dfx's Glide library. The Mesa/Glide driver is included with the Mesa distribution. You'll need to install the Glide header files and runtime library.

David Bucciarelli wrote the original 3dfx driver for Mesa.
Daryll Strauss ported Glide to Linux.

• Matrox G200/G400, nVidia RIVA, ATI Rage Pro, Intel i810 on Linux

The Utah GLX project (no longer active) developed drivers for these chipsets and others.

• Amiga Warp3D

Amiga systems can support 3D hardware with the Warp3D API. See here.

• Also see

www.linux3d.org for other 3D hardware info for Linux.

Note: If you have NVIDIA hardware in your computer, you should download and install NVIDIA's OpenGL library. You may however, want to download Mesa in order to use its GLU and GLUT libraries, or assorted demo programs.