At least for ATI there are free accelerated drivers, don't know if there are for nVidia.
The problem is that these ATI-drivers aren't that easy to install if your distro doesn't offer support on that.
For me it involved recompiling Mesa (the OpenGL-library) and the X-server (only the X-server itself, not the full set of libraries and everything) and quite some headache until I got it all together.
But they work, mostly stable and pretty nicely.

Hey reptiler!

I have the nVidia 6150 onboard!

Not to worry, I've got Feisty with non-free drivers as well: I am too much of a Novice to be a purist, or to try the kind of work you describe.

What sort of graphics device have you got? Are you using gNewSense?

I will pass on your post to the gNS forum, it sounds very interesting. Thanks!

I have an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, so it's not a really new model, but it's usable. As said, it runs pretty nice and the games I play work smoothly, including shooters like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Doom 3.
Also all the free stuff that wants accelerated 3D, like Celestia, Stellarium and the racing-game Torcs, work really good.

I don't use gNewSense, currently I'm running a modified Linux from Scratch and will probably soon switch to my own creation EasyLFS.

There are currently two best ways to have decent 3D on a purely free distro like gNewSense, using only free drivers; with Intel integrated graphichs (which I hear work well with beryl 3D desktop) and ATI Radeon's up to X850. You can have some 3D with some other onboard graphics from SiS or VIA chipsets too (S3), but I think that's even lower than Intel.

By the end of this year there may be a first beta of a free driver for some Nvidia cards too, from the Noveau project.

Right now, if you want best 3D with only Free Software I recommend Radeon 9600 up to X850 or so. Otherwise Intel integrated graphics are probably best.

But in any case, you can have great 3D on gNewSense with the right hardware (although, not thanks to AMD releasing any drivers, but thanks to the reverse engineering efforts of the R300 project).

I think the best thing i can do is to keep running my gNewSense at 1024x768@75Hz (CRT) and just keep myself informed of the projects progress through the gNS forum. I do think this is a land-mark move for the OSS World and I will try and encourage other novices to understand why.

I still have Feisty, KDE and E17 to play with and I would like to try Debian Etch (or Wretchy Etchy as I call it) next month as it's about time I met Ubuntu's parents: It's only fair, I've been seeing their daughter since last November!

Thanks reptiler and libervisco! Great replies people! :-)

I made a post on the gNewSense thread regarding this...

Currently, the only nVidia cards and Intel's chipset offer 3D acelleration using libre only drivers. nVidia cards offer nothing useful to anyone but developers at this moment. The nouveau project is doing great work writing a libre driver, but as of now, it only runs glxgears, which IS 3D, but certainly not anything people will find useful day to day.

As to the Radeon driver, it is commonly held that it is free, but using the 4 freedoms as a test, it is not.

I invite anyone to download the source code (MIT licensed, found here http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Download) and look at radeon_cp.c you'll see "Microcode (From ATI)" and microcode under that. This code directly accesses memory location on the hardware, it is a binary blob. It can not be edited in any reasonable manner, edited versions do not work and you do not have the ability to study how this code works.

With that in mind, you'll see why this code has been removed from gNewSense.

This isn't only available for download on the DRI-Wiki, this file is part of the official kernel-code.
And if you search /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/drm with the following code, you'll also find other files with such microcode.

for FILE in *; do
 if [ "$(cat $FILE | grep -i microcode)" != "" ]; then
  echo $FILE
 fi
done

There's some ATI-related files and some Matrox-related files. The Matrox ones just seem to use the word microcode in comments and function-names, but the ATIs have some of that funky code in it, meaning not only the Radeon-one, but also the driver for the R128-cards.

I'll have another look through that stuff in order to find out some more about it.
If I find something I'll post it here.

Oh, and welcome to Nuxified. :-)

Glad to be aboard, even if I am only hanging on by one of the door handles!

Yes, this is something I've been largely overlooking while going around recommending ATI cards. Unfortunately, considering that blob the best I can say is that for really good 3D graphics ATI is as close one can get to having full 3D with (almost) free drivers, at least today.

But in not so far away future this may very well be nvidia, and as you also said on IRC, they could use help.

Still it's an odd choice there. I still got an ATI card this time around because I couldn't fathom the thought of actually having to install proprietary nvidia drivers to get support, although that would allow sending useful information to the noveau project. I might at least help the guys from the R300 project though. Their drivers are still marked as experimental so I suppose some testing can help smooth them out and maybe eventually a way is found to solve this microcode issue.

Shortly put, looking by the license alone, whole of radeon driver is free, but the practice with the microcode part of it breaks some freedoms. I agree this should be pointed out as otherwise it would never be solved (if no-one actually knows about the issue). And everyone personally can decide whether they can live with this on their machine or not.

Cheers

I don't think he was greeting you. More like Kevin.