Why Wine Developers Don't See Gallium3D D3D9 As An Option

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Why Wine Developers Don't See Gallium3D D3D9 As An Option

While many Linux gamers are excited about the Gallium3D Direct3D 9 state tracker for offering better Windows gaming performance on Linux with the open-source drivers, the patches on the Wine side haven't been accepted upstream. Here's some clarification from one of the leading Wine developers on the graphics front to explain the opposition to the work...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-D3D9-Gallium-Nine-Opposed

[Kemosabe]

Is there any point about gallium nine then?
Is there any reason why any dev would start to think about gallium nine?

[rohcQaH]

The same arguments have been brought forth by wine devs when the d3d9 tracker was started, along with the intention not to merge it because it couldn't be used on Mac or non-mesa drivers. It's not surprising they stuck to it.

[Drago]

Is there any point about gallium nine then?
Is there any reason why any dev would start to think about gallium nine?

Ability to use D3D natively on Linux. Less porting efforts, since game engine can use the same render, that is already optimized and tested.

[stefandoesinger]

There is a point, and I mentioned it in my talk: Finding out how much impact it has, and using it as a tool to analyze Mesa and Wine performance. With the help of nine it is possible to e.g. compare shaders side by side and find places where the GLSL compiler creates inefficient shader code.

[pinguinpc]

Without forget legal issues, model driver issues (microsoft rights) and other issues like use nvidia adapter name (GTX680) without nvidia authorization

[Dorsai!]

Ability to use D3D natively on Linux. Less porting efforts, since game engine can use the same render, that is already optimized and tested.

No company would do something like this. The same issues that the wine devs have would arise. It would work only on a small subset of available hardware and would require supporting another completely separate codepath for all other drivers.

[sunweb]

Fully agre with him, especially 4 point. If the guys that work on Gallium D3D9 state tracker are smart enough why not use their brains in a better direction?
Improving drivers and OpenGL to the point its up there with results on Windows, and with all features possible, as glitch free as possible(my pc sometimes can't suspend to RAM and just hangs to the point where you need hard poweroff/reset, with proprietary it does(though in the past proprietary had even more trouble in this area)).

Think about this way:
- DX is controlled by MS
- Right now some games get native support and whats really important top class game engines do(even the ones that didn't want to add it before)
- Slowly but steadily Linux as a gaming platform for modern games becomes reality

What would be the point for developers to care for OpenGL(Next) support if DX(12) will be availiable on Linux. I am not talking about mobile devices. Ofcourse i am talking about impossible future here. But if its not the target than what is? Getting support for one GPU vendor for one specific(and old as hell) DX version? Why?

[darkbasic]

Stefan you're free to consider proprietary drivers a viable alternative, but please don't tell people to use Nvidia: it's our choice to not. As a radeonsi user I think it's *STUPID* to not take advantage of a better alternative when it's already available and working. gallium nine is way better than opengl translation and I will keep patching my wine. I would like to say a big THANK YOU to the gallium nine developers, who finally made wine gaming actually *viable* for non-nvidia users.

[duby229]

No company would do something like this. The same issues that the wine devs have would arise. It would work only on a small subset of available hardware and would require supporting another completely separate codepath for all other drivers.

That's the driver authors fault. Put blame where it belongs. the whole point in gallium was to develop an architecture that both OSS drivers and proprietary drivers can use.