Radeon Driver Picks Up VBOs, OQ Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon Driver Picks Up VBOs, OQ Support

There are quite a number of changes in store for Mesa 7.6, such as new state trackers for Gallium3D, other Gallium3D-specific improvements, optimized IR, and many changes to the different Mesa 3D drivers. Adding to that list, the open-source ATI R300+ driver has just picked up support for Vertex Buffer Objects and Occlusion Queries. The vbo_clean branch was merged into Mesa over the weekend, which adds hardware-based VBO support for those with newer ATI Radeon graphics cards...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzQ1OQ

[crumja]

I can't stress enough the importance of this addition. Mesa git master should now report OpenGL 1.5 for ATI cards R300-R500. OTOH, what took them so long?

[ioannis]

I can't wait for you guys to benchmark these new drivers. A nice comparison with the older OSS and the latest Catalyst.

[benmoran]

This is awesome news! Occlusion support is something i've been looking forward to.

[BlackStar]

I can't stress enough the importance of this addition. Mesa git master should now report OpenGL 1.5 for ATI cards R300-R500. OTOH, what took them so long?

Great! The open drivers are finally moving from toy to real 3d support.

This couldn't be implemented earlier, due to the lack of a memory manager.

[nanonyme]

Meh, already the former OpenGL 1.4 support was imo pretty much more than a toy...
Wonder how many actual features there are left to go (in addition to the bug fixes) before they can focus on Gallium3D and OpenGL 2.0.

[Kazade]

Meh, already the former OpenGL 1.4 support was imo pretty much more than a toy...
Wonder how many actual features there are left to go (in addition to the bug fixes) before they can focus on Gallium3D and OpenGL 2.0.

IIRC the only real big addition between GL 1.5 and 2.0 was the introduction of GLSL. So I guess, that's what's needed to bump up the version (does the OSS driver support GLSL already?).

EDIT: OK, not just GLSL, there was also: Point Sprites (GL_ARB_point_sprite), Separate Blend Equation (GL_EXT_blend_equation_separate) and Separate Stencil (GL_ATI_separate_stencil). But the others are relatively minor in comparison to GLSL.

[pedrodh]

Can't wait till this starts shipping with distros, since my kernel update I can only use the OSS drivers, and they really needed VBO. Keep the good work!

[ferreira]

hmmmm
HMMMMM
NEAT!
I have nothing against the blob (it always worked on my 9600pro, now I have hd4850 and it also works) but such great improvements in open source driver are very welcome! Keep up the good work!

[BlackStar]

Meh, already the former OpenGL 1.4 support was imo pretty much more than a toy...

Depends on your viewpoint, I guess. Personally, I consider anything less than OpenGL 2.1 + FBOs a "toy" - we are talking about 6 year old features here!

(Not bashing the open-source drivers, just saying I'd *really* love GLSL support so I can finally drop the damned fixed-function codepath from my applications).