Gallium3D Update, 2D Support Coming?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gallium3D Update, 2D Support Coming?

During FOSDEM this year, Keith Whitwell had provided a status update on Gallium3D and where they were at as of February. However, a lot has changed since then...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjY5Nw

[remm]

Hopefully Tugsten is fast enough to merge it before Keith kills it. Warning: humor inside

This stuff could be really big for Linux gaming, if Wine takes advantage of the DirectX 9 availability, rather than doing DirectX 9 -> Wine3D -> OpenGL -> driver.

The unannounced driver should be for Radeons I suppose, as it has been often mentioned by the driver community.

[Extreme Coder]

Hopefully Tugsten is fast enough to merge it before Keith kills it. Warning: humor inside

This stuff could be really big for Linux gaming, if Wine takes advantage of the DirectX 9 availability, rather than doing DirectX 9 -> Wine3D -> OpenGL -> driver.

The unannounced driver should be for Radeons I suppose, as it has been often mentioned by the driver community.

or it could be nVIDIA or VIA :P ( For me, I hope it's Radeon :P )

And I've yet to understand how can Gallium make DX9 available.. Does it emulate it in the way Wine does? Or does it provide the same API that is available on Windows? If it does provide the same API, then that would make porting games much much easier. (wishful thinking :P )

[TechMage89]

Well, gallium essentially works by compiling everything into shaders, so it can implement any api that way, including Direct3D. That said, there's a lot of DirectX stuff that's tightly integrated with windows that will still need to be emulated by wine or winelib. It may be able to bring Direct3D up to near performance-parity on Linux, though.

I'd be willing to bet that if they're not working on OpenCL for Gallium now, they will be very shortly. That's cool stuff.

[JulFX]

The unannounced driver should be for Radeons I suppose, as it has been often mentioned by the driver community.

Or maybe for the ps3 cell gpu, as it is mention on their wiki : http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki....php/Gallium3D

[ethana2]

Yeah, I'm most interested in Direct3D 10 and OpenCL myself..

Or as the engadget commenter would say
'...but can it run Crysis?'

[NeoBrain]

Just wondering, can anybody tell me the size of the "official" intel driver at the moment, so one can get a better image of how much more compact the sample driver is?

[Loris]

Or maybe for the ps3 cell gpu, as it is mention on their wiki : http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki....php/Gallium3D

I think those two drivers already have been under development for some time now, so this wouldn't be an undisclosed info. I think that that new driver could be that PowerVR driver (some free code + proprietary blob) I've been hearing about for some time now. Mainly targetting the last PowerVR chip, the SGX one, which is being used as the graphics core of the Intel's GMA 500 (integrated graphics coupled with the current Intel Atom products). I think the driver has been requested to Tungsten Graphics by Intel, to support their new "netbooks" computers, but I may be completely wrong. I read something about the release of this driver to happen at the end of 2008, so this could be it.

A beer for who guesses right?

[_txf_]

I wonder if that unknown card and unknown company is Larrabee and Intel?

[Svartalf]

or it could be nVIDIA or VIA :P ( For me, I hope it's Radeon :P )

And I've yet to understand how can Gallium make DX9 available.. Does it emulate it in the way Wine does? Or does it provide the same API that is available on Windows? If it does provide the same API, then that would make porting games much much easier. (wishful thinking :P )

Heh...

Gallium3D is a mid-level API that handles primitives, etc. as commanded via either API and it's corresponding state machine. You can have an ES, OpenGL, and D3D hook into this layer, much like the big two have framed in their proprietary drivers. Gallium3D brings us into a realm that brings the prospect of drivers nearly as fast or as fast as AMD has for their stuff, sans anything they can't give us info on like TIMMO. The fact that you have Gallium3D support of D3D doesn't lead to having this support on Linux. You still need the API and state engine pieces. Now, WINE might be able to utilize G3D to talk more directly to the hardware- if they can manage to process HLSL to something useful and more succinctly model the state machine that D3D uses.