The New R300 Register Allocator Is Still Being Developed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The New R300 Register Allocator Is Still Being Developed

Tom Stellard, the student developer who participated in last year's Google Summer of Code to improve the R300 GLSL compiler for the open-source ATI/AMD driver, is still around and contributing to upstream Mesa. Last month he announced his new R300 register allocator being ready for wider testing. He's now announced further improvements on this GPU register allocator for Mesa...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTM1Nw

[crispy]

Its nice with all the work being done, but isn't the performance of the R300 at an acceptable level now? Maybe focusing on code for newer chips would give more in the long run?

[Veerappan]

Its nice with all the work being done, but isn't the performance of the R300 at an acceptable level now? Maybe focusing on code for newer chips would give more in the long run?

At the moment, a lot of work is going into improving the core mesa functionality but using the r300-r500 chips. Some of the work is being done specifically for the r300 drivers, but a lot of it can carry over to benefit other drivers as well.

[crispy]

At the moment, a lot of work is going into improving the core mesa functionality but using the r300-r500 chips. Some of the work is being done specifically for the r300 drivers, but a lot of it can carry over to benefit other drivers as well.

Yeah, but this work here cant right?

[Veerappan]

Yeah, but this work here cant right?

I'm not familiar with the code itself, but I'm guessing no. It may be useful in optimizing register allocation in general, but it might also only work for r300.

[mattst88]

Its nice with all the work being done, but isn't the performance of the R300 at an acceptable level now? Maybe focusing on code for newer chips would give more in the long run?

Good grief. Stop complaining about what other people choose to spend their free time on.

[Qaridarium]

Its nice with all the work being done, but isn't the performance of the R300 at an acceptable level now? Maybe focusing on code for newer chips would give more in the long run?

its logical to extra support r300 because r600 customers can install the catalyst.

meybe if amd drops support on r600 the OS guys helps you out in making an extra super AAA+ driver for you

[benmoran]

its logical to extra support r300 because r600 customers can install the catalyst.

Yes exactly.

But... I have an HD5770, and I REALLY don't want to install Catalyst. I think I might do it for a little while though, just to play the new Frozenbyte Humble Bundle games.

[89c51]

Good grief. Stop complaining about what other people choose to spend their free time on.

This is one of the "quirks" of open source IMO. In a world where features & quality is all that matters you simply cannot treat parts of the infrastructure as "hobby projects". Of course you cannot force people to work on certain things so....

And yes you can always install a blob but FOSS needs to have a feature complete graphic stack at some point.

[marek]

This is one of the "quirks" of open source IMO. In a world where features & quality is all that matters you simply cannot treat parts of the infrastructure as "hobby projects".

It will always be a hobby project as long as it's free.