Gallium3D To Enter Mainline Mesa Code

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gallium3D To Enter Mainline Mesa Code

As we shared late last week, Mesa 7.3 is getting ready for release with the first release candidate having arrived. Mesa 7.3 will feature improved GLSL 1.20 support, support for the Graphics Execution Manager, and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2 integration...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Njk4OA

[ethana2]

So Jaunty ships WINE in main.. If Jaunty+1 shipped Gallium D3D instead of WINED3D, I'd be ecstatic. I can't wait to play Halo 2 on my Ubuntu Dell

[Eragon]

Does Gallium3d really have direct3d support on linux??

[chelobaka]

So Jaunty ships WINE in main.. If Jaunty+1 shipped Gallium D3D instead of WINED3D, I'd be ecstatic. I can't wait to play Halo 2 on my Ubuntu Dell

There is no reason to implement D3D in Gallium3D considering amount of work needed. WINE does its job well enough. Most of the apps already created for D3D will never be ported to Linux even if we'll have D3D compatible API due to devs stuck to M$ platform.
Companies ready to take an effort of making OpenGL games get a huge slice of pie from Mac users, and Linux if they wish to (Blizzard is a good example). But Mac will never get D3D. No market - no cross-platform games.
You can blame Khronos Group for their poor OpenGL 3.0 specs leaving free software far behind Windows in gaming world
As for me, there is no game I can't live without on my Ubuntu. Someday You can realize it too.

[mirza]

Current battle for PC gaming is over and MS won. But there will be next round soon, when Intel releases ray-tracing capable graphic cards to general public. Companies like Sony, Sun, Intel and Nintendo can create Java-based raytracing gaming platform with possibility to easily port game to PC (Windows/Linux), to OSX, to Playstation 4, even integrate gaming to consumer electronics, like TVs and Set-top-box. That would push DirectX to the corner. Other possibility is that these companies will, just like today, separately play catch-up with MS implementation of ray-tracing DX extensions. That would be great for MS, none of these companies alone is threat to them in the area of PC gaming.

[puelocesar]

PC gaming is Doomed. Even Microsoft doesn't support it anymore, now that they have Xbox. Fable II for example: just Xbox360.

My interest in Gallium is better graphics drivers for Linux, because currently that is that area that sucks more today

It's difficult to promote Linux to friends when even 2D performance sucks badly on most drivers..

(ok, I admin, I'm really pissed of with intel drivers, which supposedly would have the best support on linux)

[NeoBrain]

Current battle for PC gaming is over and MS won. But there will be next round soon, when Intel releases ray-tracing capable graphic cards to general public. Companies like Sony, Sun, Intel and Nintendo can create Java-based raytracing gaming platform with possibility to easily port game to PC (Windows/Linux), to OSX, to Playstation 4, even integrate gaming to consumer electronics, like TVs and Set-top-box. That would push DirectX to the corner. Other possibility is that these companies will, just like today, separately play catch-up with MS implementation of ray-tracing DX extensions. That would be great for MS, none of these companies alone is threat to them in the area of PC gaming.

I got no clue where the hell that myth comes from, but ray tracing on future Intel CPUs won't change anything at all. Game developers will still use their graphics APIs (and the "normal game programming languages") just like today, but the "Intel" graphics driver will use a CPU instead of a GPU.
Apart from that, raytracing with Direct3D is in development at the moment (so no wonderfull new era of platform independent graphics APIs), the situation will just get worse as the people behind OpenGL will just add that functionality using extensions, but I guess that discussion has been hold long enough now...

[mirza]

Game developers will still use their graphics APIs

Of course we will use some API, but drawing scene with ray-tracing is completely different then current rendering. Currently, there is lot of work CPU must do to paint image that "feels" realistic. Thats why we really need C/C++ right now. In ray-tracing, you just setup a scene, no object simplification (removing points) is needed, no tricks for shadows, no calculating parts of scene that you can/can't see (reducing scene size for faster rendering) etc. You can just send massive scene to GPU and use CPU only to re-arrange objects there. That would greatly simplify code for graphical part of the game. Still, AI and physics must be done on the CPU, but Java (or .NET in case of MS) can do that, I am pretty sure. Benefits are obvious (debugging multithreaded app is one clear example).

[rbmorse]

You can blame Khronos Group for their poor OpenGL 3.0 specs leaving free software far behind Windows in gaming world

Look at the membership of Khronos. You won't find many game or FOSS proponents on that list.

[ethana2]

There is no reason to implement D3D in Gallium3D considering amount of work needed. WINE does its job well enough. Most of the apps already created for D3D will never be ported to Linux even if we'll have D3D compatible API due to devs stuck to M$ platform.

I'm talking about implementing a Direct3D API that WINE can just pass D3D to instead of having the WINE folks try to reimplemented it in OpenGL, so they can focus on the actual win32 API. What we have now is NOT okay, it's buggy as heck and there's a performance hit from translation and poor optimization that gallium should eliminate. I'm thinking it'll be a ton easier to code it with gallium than it would be to do it in GLSL.