Gallium3d Momentum

[Prescience500]

I've been trying to figure something out for awhile about Gallium3d. I know that Nouveau has switched over to using Gallium3d. I've read about many other drivers now use Gallium3d, but it seems that for those drivers, they can use either Gallium3d or the original 3d library (classic mesa for instance.) Does anyone know there are plans for the open source drivers to switch entirely to Gallium3d for a 3d library and drop support for the original 3d library? Also, I'm curious to know if Gallium3d is catching up to it's open source competitors like Classic Mesa (I know in many cases it's currently still behind).

[bridgman]

It's definitely catching up for ATI 3xx-5xx GPUs, which I *think* are the only hardware family where both classic and Gallium3D drivers are current and available. It's probably fair to say that the Gallium3D driver has reached the point where it's noticeably better than the classic driver on some apps, equivalent in function but slower in performance on other apps, and broken on a fairly small and shrinking number of apps.

Not sure what current consensus is but AFAIK the focus right now is on unbreaking the last few broken apps (if that hasn't already been done) so that the Gallium3D driver can become default for 3xx-5xx GPUs.

I haven't been paying enough attention to the VMWare driver (for the emulated SVGA you get in a virtual machine) but I suspect that stack has already switched over to Gallium3D completely.

[Ex-Cyber]

Does anyone know there are plans for the open source drivers to switch entirely to Gallium3d for a 3d library and drop support for the original 3d library?

Gallium3D is not really a "3D library", but rather a set of driver/library interfaces. Gallium3D systems still use the Mesa library for OpenGL, it's just that Mesa is using its Gallium3D driver rather than one of the GPU-specific drivers.