From LQWiki

DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure) is an infrastructure which allows for hardware 3D graphics acceleration in Linux. It has been included in X (XFree86 4.x and Xorg).

It is usually used together with X to run OpenGL applications. In this case, from a users point of view, DRI is made of the following parts (top down view from an 3D application):

• OpenGL (Mesa3d in this case).
• The X driver for the specific graphics card (made of an 2D part and a 3D DRI part)
• Linux Direct Rendering Manager kernel module.
• Actual hardware (See Video card).

If it has been enabled it can directly use the local hardware for 3d rendering (direct rendering), bypassing the X protocol. It currently doesn't support remote rendering, meaning that if the 3d application runs on a remote X, the OpenGL implementation on the side with the actual display hardware won't use hardware acceleration. All OpenGL commands will be send using the X protocol (the GLX extension) over the network and executed in software in this case (See AIGLX for a way around this).

See also

• driconf utility to configure DRI.
• Increasing_opengl_game_performence
• OpenGL without X

External links

• DRI website (dri.sourceforge.net)