Trying Out The VC4 OpenGL Gallium3D Driver On The Raspberry Pi 2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying Out The VC4 OpenGL Gallium3D Driver On The Raspberry Pi 2

With this week's Raspbian update offering experimental OpenGL support via the open-source VC4 driver stack for the Raspberry Pi 2, I decided to try enabling this feature...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Trying-VC4-On-Raspbian-RPi2

[liam]

Has Eric said anything about the status of the video acceleration hardware?

[triangle]

"At least though the Raspberry Pi 2 now has faster glxgears"

Already faster than the binary drivers?... well thats nice

[Veerappan]

"At least though the Raspberry Pi 2 now has faster glxgears"

Already faster than the binary drivers?... well thats nice

I think that he's referring to the announcement about the raspbian VC4 update. glxgears used to be using either llvmpipe or softpipe, which ran ~22fps or something. Now with the VC4 driver, it can handle a 60fps vsync'd display.

I don't know if the broadcom driver actually exposes full desktop GL (or just GLES/EGL), and so actual GL software probably ended up forced into software rendering.

I guess someone could try out some GLES2 or EGL benchmarks and try to compare/contrast the broadcom binary driver and VC4... I'm assuming that the VC4 driver was built with gles1/2 support in raspbian.

*wishing I had a Pi2 instead of just a Pi Model B*. Maybe it's time to go shopping.

[Guest]

My main interest in OpenGL support for the Pi is StepMania. I have a custom-built dance pad setup and currently run with a power-hungry regular desktop. Would be real nice to be able to use a Pi for this, and as an added bonus, things like light control should be much easier to handle over GPIO.

Currently, StepMania 5 plays with the new OGL driver, but at sub-par FPS (about 20-30, not including video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAGRCerCWAU Hopefully this will improve in-time though, although I'm not certain if the GPU driver is the issue here or not (SM5 seems to eat a single CPU core, but I'm not sure if this is a SM5 thing, or if it's trying to emulate some unsupported OGL feature; GL_EXT_paletted_texture for example isn't supported).

I wonder if an older version of SM would work better, but as I understand, compiling older versions of SM isn't too fun.

[gsedej]

I tried running OpenMW and original Morrowind asset. Again there is problem with S3TC compression, so no textures. But it runs.
(using gallium HUD, there is also neverball game)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6NlabwfR_0&feature=youtu.be

According to OpenMW forums, Eric Anholt said that S3TC isn't supported by HW.

https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2850&sid=d499ff7b929a1c8f4725637d4c75e540&start=10#p34224

But it has ETC1

https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2850&sid=d499ff7b929a1c8f4725637d4c75e540&start=10#p34239

[curaga]

Guest, gsedej: Why do you go to so much trouble to use such limited hw? I doubt you have a hard power cap at 5W, given your monitor likely uses 70W. If the issue is open drivers, get an AMD or Intel ITX board; if cost, get an AM-1 Athlon 5350 setup. They will blow the pants off a Pi, and an AM1 setup won't even cost that much more than a Pi with case, charger, cables, and shipping and tax.

[darkbasic]

gsedej is it currently possibile to use ETC1 in openmw?

[Kano]

@gsedej

Did you install "libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0"?

[gsedej]

curaga "so much trouble"? just install image to SD card, enable GL driver and add sources for openmw (and put morrowind assets). The biggest problem is that SD card (at least mine) is slow.

darkbasic. I am not developer. But it should be possible to make OpenMW demo assets (their own). I don't know if it's possible to convert actual Morrowind assests.

@Kano: yes