3D Graphics

The XO has no built in 3D accelerator, but that doesn't mean that it can't do 3D graphics! This page is for those of us working to bring 3D graphics to the XO.

Current state of 3D on XO

All OLPC laptop current models(XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75) don't have 3D acceleration hardware (GPU/ 3D graphic card) commonly found on today computers and probably won't be added in future models to reduce costs or battery consumption. According to testing most modern 3D games or graphics that use OpenGL won't run at all or even simple 3D cube will run extremly slow on the laptop. To overcome this limitation a possible solution is to use some 3D game that use in addiction to OpenGL a Software render engine.

Wikipedia

Software rendering Software rendering refers to a rendering process that is unaided by any specialized graphics hardware, such as a graphics card. The rendering takes place entirely in the CPU. Rendering everything with the (general-purpose) CPU has the main advantage that it is not restricted to the (limited) capabilities of graphics hardware.

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Software (tested successfully on the XO-1)

What XO activities / software uses 3D graphics? Those games are not suitable for children due to violence, but since they have been released as open source,they can be modified and used as a base or framework to build new educational games and simulations.

• Blender 3D (very slow)
• Doom
• Quake I
• Quake II
• Hexen II