I've been doing most of this project on my work laptop because it has HDMI out and bluetooth and I don't have a machine new or nice enough at home to have these things. It has a NVidia graphics card and I've always been satisfied with the noveau drivers. Until today.
I finally had all 4 controllers working so I gave a 4 player race in Supertux Kart a whirl. It was painfully laggy. I haven't figured out how to print the framerate on screen but it was bad. The controls were all slow and gameplay would have been no fun. Good thing it was just a test.
So I had to go to proprietary drivers. Doesn't that break the whole goal of the FOGC?! Probably, but at least these are supported by the manufacturer, and aren't a break of any license agreement. Its a real shame, but OH! what a difference it made, suddenly everything is smoother frame rate is excellent, and the controls are super responsive.
What this really means is that when it comes to the time to buy hardware for this project, nvidia is a no-go, because it required proprietary software to have acceptable performance. I'll have to do some more research on what I should get, because I've never cared about graphics performance before and noveau has been more than sufficient. But I'll cross that bridge when it comes.
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