Sorry for the over excited title, but my evening roam around the blogosphere brought me past Rudolf's 3D Blog, where he has posted today that he now has actual acceleration running on his GeForce 2MX. This lets Quake II for BeOS run in Hardware 3D at up to 10FPS, compared to the 3-6FPS software OpenGL would provide (note that Q2 has a BeOS native software renderer that does 60FPS, but thats not in use here).

This speed is only preliminary, as many functions still have to be computed in software. Don't despair, it will get a lot higher as Rudolf progresses.

This is the first time he has hardware acceleration running at a faster speed than either Be's or MESA's software renderer. All of this is without specifications for the hardware being easily available, and it it is the first time that someone other than a Be beta tester has had OpenGL (rather than Glide) hardware acceleration under BeOS.

***UPDATE*** April 12th, 22:38 IST:

Rudolf has updated his blog with some extensive benchmarks of the now working 3D accelerant on a number of cards. It turns out the speed of 10FPS was a fluke - in a good way. The NV18 engine that the card he was using has is significantly underperforming. An NV05 powered card such as as a TNT2 gets 30-40FPS, depending on model, and NV11 GeForce2 cards get close to 40FPS. These are speeds at which a game is actually playable, and this is with a driver that is still using PIO mode and not fully completed, even to what Rudolf has specs for.

Expect to see some serious speed increases in the future.