Gallium3D Now At Version 0.3 In Mesa

[Craig73]

...further clarifications provided...

Thanks Bridgman. I'm very excited for this, the open source driver space is very interesting (well... especially because I don't get to see inside of the closed source drivers ;-) )

And also thanks NeoBrain, certainly all those reasons make sense.

[larva]

I'm a little suprised by the size reported for these drivers. Though I must admit I don't know how big any corresponding drivers were pre-Gallium. Hence I'm curious if these Gallium drivers are matching expectations -- are they smaller and clearer than the original, non-Gallium drivers?

I realize that this comparison is probably made difficult or impossible by lack of feature parity and that Gallium is still quite new, but I should hope some level of sanity check is possible after all this time.

[bridgman]

If you look in src/mesa/drivers/dri/r300 (the classic mesa driver) there's roughly 23,000 lines of code, so it's probably safe to say that the corresponding Gallium3D driver will be smaller. MostAwesomeDude is probably best positioned to guess how big the final r300 driver will be, but it seems like there's at least a few thousand lines of code to be added still.

The register headers (r300_reg.h) are 3258 lines so I guess you could subtract those from both drivers to get a better comparison of code size. The end result will probably be somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 the size of the corresponding "classic mesa" hw driver.

There also seems to be pretty good agreement that the Gallium3D API and code is cleaner.

[Craig73]

Will Gallium3d with it's softpipe driver (software rendering) and possibly LLVM replace the software rendering in Mesa?

[perhaps it is too soon for such a question ;-) ]

[curaga]

Will Gallium3d with it's softpipe driver (software rendering) and possibly LLVM replace the software rendering in Mesa?

Probably not completely, but I hope it will be an alternative. OS X with its LLVM optimizations is not painful to use even without any hardware acceleration.