ATI R300 Gallium3D DRI Support Is "Done"

[Pfanne]

this sound great!
good job corbin!

[pedrodh]

What does this driver bring of new that the opensource one present now, let's say, in Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't have? I can't fully understand what is this Gallium driver, I've never used it on my system, but this interests me since I've a laptop with an ATI X600.

I've visited wikipedia, but that didn't help much, I hope you guys can explain it to a noob like me :P

[panda84]

I am confused. To my understanding there is no OpenGL (except OpenGL ES) state tracker yet. How is it possible to run glxgears, openarena and compiz then?

I think the OpenGL 3.x is still missing, but the fixed function OpenGL should be in place:
http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/gallium

Traditional fixed-function OpenGL components (such as lighting and texture combining) are implemented with shaders. OpenGL commands such as glDrawPixels are translated into textured quadrilateral rendering. Basically, any rendering operation that isn't directly supported by modern graphics hardware is translated into a hardware-friendly form.

Future state trackers will be created for OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL-ES 2.x.

[panda84]

What does this driver bring of new that the opensource one present now, let's say, in Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't have? I can't fully understand what is this Gallium driver, I've never used it on my system, but this interests me since I've a laptop with an ATI X600.

I've visited wikipedia, but that didn't help much, I hope you guys can explain it to a noob like me :P

From a user point of view Gallium is pretty useless at the moment, it still needs time (1 year or more) to mature.
Long term advantages are:

• better performances (the architecture is similar to modern proprietary graphic drivers)
• once you implement the core driver you automatically have support for a lot of tecnologies (OpenGL, EXA, and maybe in the future video acceleration)

These are things that cannot be achieved rapidly by the current driver architecture.

[Louise]

And also what does the python state tracker means ?

I am guessing here, but I would think it is a python binding, so you can access OpenGL from Python.

This I do know, that the plan is to make a Python binding to OpenCL, so you can off load calculations to the GPU from Python instead of only C and C++.

[Xheyther]

As a pythoner I think it would be wonderfull !!

Thank anyway.

[BlackStar]

I am guessing here, but I would think it is a python binding, so you can access OpenGL from Python.

This I do know, that the plan is to make a Python binding to OpenCL, so you can off load calculations to the GPU from Python instead of only C and C++.

Python already has bindings to OpenCL, as does Mono/.Net, Java and several other languages. Google is your friend!

[V!NCENT]

Google is your friend!

That is, if you know what to search for...

[Louise]

Python already has bindings to OpenCL, as does Mono/.Net, Java and several other languages. Google is your friend!

I didn't knew that was already implemented in the closed source version.

But you definitely can't do that in the open source version =)

[pingufunkybeat]

Let me see if I get this correctly...

Once the r300-specific driver is written (which is essentially finished now), it can plug into all the other hardware-independent modules of Galium and make use of them?

Am I understanding correctly that the remaining Mesa/OpenGL-related work is not dependent on the r300g driver, but is done once for all the drivers? So we are waiting for the same thing that all the other drivers are waiting for?