Second the required 3d functionality is VERY limited. Basicly the
only
thing the videocard needs support is texturing which all cards do.
But that's obviously wrong - the video *driver* also needs to support
it.
And the current 3D video driver situation in Linux is horrible.
Yeah linux drivers are crap for videocards from companies like S3/Via, XGI/Sis and also Intel. Most cards have some basic 3d driver support (the newer S3 ones not yet) but this basic support is enough. Texturing is something that is supported by all those basic drivers and cards. If your card can play Quake I it can also be used for the ddraw over direct3d renderer. A simple voodoo1 would even be fast enough (although this card can't do more than 16bit). The card also doesn't have to be fast. For instance your 2d game works at 800x600 and you use double buffering. You need to process half a million pixels for a single frame. That voodoo1 about which I talked already has a fillrate of 60MPixels so it can already do it fast enough. (one of the bottlenecks is the uploading of textures which happens through PCI / AGP / PCI-Express but this bottleneck appears for all drawing operations)
Roderick