Gallium3D Gets A Blitter Module

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gallium3D Gets A Blitter Module

Gallium3D has been a topic we have talked about a lot lately from the OpenCL state tracker to VMware's virtual GPU driver, but this graphics driver architecture keeps on advancing. The most recent module for Gallium3D is one written by Marek Olšák that provides a blitter. Once the core blitter support is merged into Gallium3D, Marek has already implementing patches for the ATI r300g driver that are able to take advantage of this blitter work...

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

[FireBurn]

Care to tell us what a blitter is?

[stikonas]

Care to tell us what a blitter is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitter

[MostAwesomeDude]

Care to tell us what a blitter is?

A blitter is a specialized chip that can initialize memory to a certain value or copy one chunk of memory to another place. It's very fast.

For r300 and r600, using the HW to blit isn't straightforward; r300 requires a context switch (which is dead-slow and prone to occasional lockup if done wrong) and r600 just doesn't have a blitter. So this little chunk of code provides blitting services on the 3D engine instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitter

[FireBurn]

A blitter is a specialized chip that can initialize memory to a certain value or copy one chunk of memory to another place. It's very fast.

For r300 and r600, using the HW to blit isn't straightforward; r300 requires a context switch (which is dead-slow and prone to occasional lockup if done wrong) and r600 just doesn't have a blitter. So this little chunk of code provides blitting services on the 3D engine instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitter

Thanks for that - sometimes I feel these articles are just cut and pasted from blogs and mailing lists posts with out any thought or extra input

[xeros]

A blitter is a specialized chip that can initialize memory to a certain value or copy one chunk of memory to another place. It's very fast.

For r300 and r600, using the HW to blit isn't straightforward; r300 requires a context switch (which is dead-slow and prone to occasional lockup if done wrong) and r600 just doesn't have a blitter. So this little chunk of code provides blitting services on the 3D engine instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitter

Thanks, but what it means for us (R300 hardware users)?
Faster 3D? 2D? Compositing (for example window moving or scrolling)?
Will application just make use of it if the drivers supports that or software needs to be heavly modified to work better by using that technique?

[oneman]

yitter jitter christmas critter, is this blitter frigger available in gitter ?

[MostAwesomeDude]

Thanks, but what it means for us (R300 hardware users)?
Faster 3D? 2D? Compositing (for example window moving or scrolling)?
Will application just make use of it if the drivers supports that or software needs to be heavly modified to work better by using that technique?

It means that I get to nuke a bunch of lame hard-coded 3D engine setup in r300g.

Oh, wait, I already did. :3

[Xheyther]

I had a dream, about a news site on linux that provides also some infos on the technical context (explanations, implications and consequences for the dev and the end-user...).

[bulletxt]

I had a dream, about a news site on linux that provides also some infos on the technical context (explanations, implications and consequences for the dev and the end-user...).

No, you are exchanging the internet for a CS Degree.