R600 Gallium3D Driver Now Supports S3TC Library

[rafirafi]

I'm running s3tcc with ubuntu Maverick with the 2.6.38 drm-next kernel from:
kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline
and update your graphics with ppa xorg-edgers.

And with this kernel
export R600_ENABLE_S3TC=1 is needed.

[drag]

Isn't the purpose of having OpenGL to be able to steer hardware functions of graphic cards?

No.

The purpose of OpenGL is to have a standardized API for developing 3D applications. Hardware acceleration is purely optional.

DirectX is a different beast were you have specific hardware requirements to go with APIs. With OpenGL this is not true. This makes DirectX easier in some aspects, but OpenGL is more universal.

The original purpose of 'hardware acceleration' for OpenGL was to take the parts of the OpenGL API that are slow and accelerate them with hardware functions.

But that is no longer true also.

OpenGL, even with 'hardware acceleration' is almost all software. The difference is that with 'hardware acceleration' the software that makes up the OpenGL libraries and APIs is designed to run on both your main processor and your graphics processor. The graphics processor being more and more general purpose. Your 'OpenGL stack' is just software compiled to use both the CPU and GPU at the same time. More or less. OR at least it's increasingly like that.


The sort of 'fixed function 3D acceleration in hardware' is becoming a increasingly legacy feature among modern hardware. Eventually it will be dead and gone.

Everything is becoming general purpose. Eventually the GPUs will be cores running at 4000mhz right as just another bunch of cores along with your CPU. The biggest limitation right now is memory bandwidth and the solution to that is just to make your main memory REALLY REALLY fast.

[tball]

Will this have any impact on Heroes of Newerth? Last time I tried HON was with Natty's r600 driver, and it didn't like it very much. I get corruption all over the screen.

[tball]

BTW. Congrats to the developers. This driver is becoming great!

[Fenrin]

with Fedora 15 testing (e.g. Fedora 15 Beta TC1) it's also possible to use S3TC textures.

It's nice to see so much progress with the Radeon drivers. Altough the S3TC textures seem still to be not fully implemented. One example where some textures are missing is Regnum Online (screenshot).

[whitecat]

Just install 2.6.39-rc1 (retrieve it on koji) to have full s3tc handle.
ETQW works with few bugs of course (for instance this one https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35434 )

[Morpheus]

For the ground texture bug, it may be something related to the "MegaTexture" technology used in ETQW. As S3TC has just emerged in oss drivers, some exotic techniques may need some fixing too.

I don't really have time to test it myself, so I may be entirely wrong.

[whizse]

For the ground texture bug, it may be something related to the "MegaTexture" technology used in ETQW. As S3TC has just emerged in oss drivers, some exotic techniques may need some fixing too.

Unless it's a recent regression in libtxc_dxtn the problem is most likely in r600g, both for ETQW and the bug in Regnum.

The S3TC library has been around for a long time and both games don't have these bugs with other drivers. It's the support in r600g that's new, not S3TC support in general.

[Welsh Dwarf]

Just out of interest, what framerates are you getting with these games (on what hardware)?

David

[whitecat]

If I remember roughly between 30 - 40 FPS on RV770 (Radeon 4850) at low details (1680*1650).