ATI R300-R500 Gallium3D Driver Is "Mostly" Done

[madman2k]

has anybody tried already to run the Gallium3D based drivers and can provide some experiences?

[MostAwesomeDude]

I'm very tired (just got off the road after a couple hours) so I'll respond without quoting.

This status update is to reflect that r300g is pretty much done in terms of structure; nearly all remaining issues are blocker bugs rather than the result of shoddy or incomplete code. I mainly wanted to nuke the individual rows since the GalliumStatus page has those already, and in greater detail.

As far as I know, nobody, including myself, has started work on r600g. The current code should permit software passthrough without modification, provided that one is running the r600 KMS/CS kernel, but I have not actually verified it so it is listed as incomplete.

Gallium requires shaderful cards. r100g is impossible, r200g could happen if somebody writes the shader->FF auxiliary code required. (I wouldn't recommend it.)

r600g required KMS, GEM/TTM, and CS, just like r300g. (DRI2 only; I didn't want to bend backwards to support old, fail interfaces.) Now that the r600 KMS/CS code is there, and nearly stable, the biggest blocker is that I'm waiting for the cash to send away to Newegg for a PCIe motherboard to replace my old fried one. Then away we'll go, to the land of Gallium.

Dave, Nicolai, and I, talked about NPOT. In a nutshell, we can do rectangles but not NPOT, which technically means that full HW-accelerated GL 2.0 is not possible on r500. So, why does fglrx advertise it anyway? Simple. fglrx lies and advertises GL 2.0 (for the GLSL entrypoints) without actually advertising the NPOT extension. Bad fglrx, bad. Jakob and I are thinking that we'll either write out fallbacks in the state tracker, or we'll just lie like fglrx. One of the two.

i965g was nuked because it never actually worked. It never actually ran on real hardware, and was broken badly. Removing it helps people understand this, and paves the way for an eventual, non-suck i965g driver.

I think that's everything. Thanks for the questions, time for sleep now. :3

~ C.

[whizse]

Now that the r600 KMS/CS code is there, and nearly stable, the biggest blocker is that I'm waiting for the cash to send away to Newegg for a PCIe motherboard to replace my old fried one. Then away we'll go, to the land of Gallium.

Can't you set up a PayPal account (or something similar). Paying for hardware for you (and other developers) seems like the least we could do.

[MostAwesomeDude]

Can't you set up a PayPal account (or something similar). Paying for hardware for you (and other developers) seems like the least we could do.

Anonymous donors have already given me video cards in excess of the hardware I'm planning to buy, so don't sweat it. I'm just trying to keep a hobbyist thing (video drivers) from causing me to blow through all my savings. :3

[Pitabred]

Anonymous donors have already given me video cards in excess of the hardware I'm planning to buy, so don't sweat it. I'm just trying to keep a hobbyist thing (video drivers) from causing me to blow through all my savings. :3

If you want to pm me your address (if it's a suitable model), I have an older Gigabyte motherboard with a Radeon x1250 embedded and a single PCIe slot on it and an Athlon X2 4600+ I'd be willing to send you gratis. I've got all the original packaging and everything. You'd have to pick up some DDR2 for it, but otherwise it's been a pretty decent motherboard. I just upgraded to a Phenom II X4 955, so it needed a new mobo but not new RAM. Only concern with Linux is the PMP code for the SATA chips on it. But I think it's fixed in recent kernels.

You can also hit me sometimes on AIM, "david is supar"

[yoshi314]

Full HW-accelerated GL 2.0 is not possible on r500

i never knew that. i don't recall any tech review that said that. now i feel somewhat cheated.

[MostAwesomeDude]

i never knew that. i don't recall any tech review that said that. now i feel somewhat cheated.

You and me both, man. You an me both.

If it makes you feel better, we can emulate nearly all of it with fallbacks of various kinds; so far, I think the only case we're missing is repeating or mirrored-repeating NPOT texturing with custom mipmaps, which nobody would ever do because NPOT mipmaps are so expensive, and even then, it'll still look close enough for just about any regular use.

Everything else *should* be handled in the state tracker. This is part of the Gallium fun -- things the pipe driver can't do, the state tracker can handle itself.

[nhaehnle]

Corbin aka MostAwesomeDude said pretty much everything that needs to be said. From my side, GLSL support is progressing, if slowly. However, I doubt we'll be able to recommend r300g for common use in the Mesa 7.7 timeframe.

What we really need is developer manpower. If you're curious about this stuff, try running r300g and fixing one of the many problems that Piglit reports. Once we have the majority of Piglit tests running, there's a fair chance that complex apps (Compiz, games) have reasonable support. So get out those debuggers, or don't get your expectations up too high, because this thing is still crawling full of seriously bad bugs.

[quintesse]

If you're curious about this stuff, try running r300g and fixing one of the many problems that Piglit reports

I wouldn't mind, but I guess I won't be of much help (yet) with my r600 based card?

[nhaehnle]

I wouldn't mind, but I guess I won't be of much help (yet) with my r600 based card?

True, this is R300-R500 only at the moment.