Mesa 7.12 Is Now Where The Fun Is At

[Yfrwlf]

Last AAA title for Linux would be Quake Wars I guess. Did you buy it? =)

Yep, and it wasn't all that great. I was going to say Quake Wars for mentioning an "AAA title", then I thought about mentioning Quake 4, then I thought about mentioning Doom 3, then I thought about mentioning Unreal Tournament, then I just gave up. Linux is missing out on a lot of deep/AAA/quality/lengthy games, and there's no reason why Diablo 3 as well as Starcraft 2 shouldn't be released for Linux. When I talk to random strangers and they know about and run Ubuntu on some of their computers, I know Blizzard would make its money back paying for one developer to spend a little bit of time porting their OS X Unix release to Linux.

[Azpegath]

Yep, and it wasn't all that great. I was going to say Quake Wars for mentioning an "AAA title", then I thought about mentioning Quake 4, then I thought about mentioning Doom 3, then I thought about mentioning Unreal Tournament, then I just gave up. Linux is missing out on a lot of deep/AAA/quality/lengthy games, and there's no reason why Diablo 3 as well as Starcraft 2 shouldn't be released for Linux. When I talk to random strangers and they know about and run Ubuntu on some of their computers, I know Blizzard would make its money back paying for one developer to spend a little bit of time porting their OS X Unix release to Linux.

Yes I agree. But there must be some issue with it (or just suits deciding it's not worth it based on that they've never heard of Linux) since they don't. I mean, Icculus was porting all UT games before, but they chose not do it anymore. And I agree that the OS X port shouldn't be overly hard to port to Linux, except that while OS X is an extremely controlled platform Linux is the most fragmented one there is.

[marek]

A few replies to various posts.

OpenGL 3.0 might really happen in 7.12/8.0. We are quite close.

I am not going to do any significant work for r300g, I consider that driver done. I will still fix bugs though. Radeon 9550 is a pretty slow card and no driver will make that fast.

Two big features which are missing in r300g are Hyper-Z (mostly works, but I wasn't able to fix it completely, so I am not going to enable it by default) and MSAA.

If somebody has any issues with r300g, he/she should report bugs at bugs.freedesktop.org. Reporting bugs on forums is pointless. GPU lockups are usually caused by the kernel DRM, not r300g, and are usually chip-specific (otherwise they would be fixed right now).

I would rather not buy an AGP R600 card. I have heard it did not work well with open drivers. No idea what the status is now. Better get a PCIe one.

[tom.higgy]

Thanks for the report regarding r300g.

I would rather not buy an AGP R600 card. I have heard it did not work well with open drivers. No idea what the status is now. Better get a PCIe one.

Agreed. Unfortunately I'm limited to buying an AGP card or, my preferred option, waiting a while and buying a whole new machine. Llano looks pretty tempting (when reasonably well supported in open-source drivers).

[darkbasic]

Hyper-Z (mostly works, but I wasn't able to fix it completely, so I am not going to enable it by default)

Leaving nearly finished tasks disabled because of a last bug is really a pity, shouldn't an amd employee being able to check how does catalyst implement it and workaround the problem?

[smitty3268]

It should show up in other tests too, I don't think one would need etqw specifically to see the difference (or lack of).

Patch author says it only shows up when r_useOcclusionQueries is set to 1 in the etqw settings, and that it avoids a bunch of flushes in that case. It probably shows up in anything that uses occlusion queries.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ne/009076.html

[Danny]

+1 I guess. Now that I think about it



I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like an ass, but why not buy a new card? It's possible to find a modern card for $80 which will still blow your old card out of the waters. There's even a silent (fan-less) Radeon 5450 card there for $50.
Performance comparison of graphics cards for less than $100.
I think it's great that the old stuff still works in Linux (especially since a lot of people don't see any gain in switching), but is the hardware still relevant enough to support it when compared to newer hardware? I do agree that games shouldn't crash your system, but have you tried if it crashes with Catalyst drivers? Can you get a crash dump so you can send it to the devs and recreate the scenario?

You didn't sound like an ass, no offense taken Your point is very valid. The system I was referring is an old system for me to learn a few things on linux or kids to play games on. I don't see much point spending money on my older system. Catalyst is not a solution unless i downgrade. Maybe I should just buy a new card. I'll provide backtraces, once I can backtrace properly. The more number of bugs are fixed, the better isn't it?

The other reason i said i would like to see improvement on older hardware is to cover for scenarios where people are unable to upgrade their graphics card, such as on a laptop. And by improvement, I mainly mean bug fixing and sufficient video acceleration.

Also, thanks for informative post, marek. Appreciate your work done on r300g. Hyper-Z still causes tiled corruptions for me, but I'm not fussed. Yea, I should file bugs where appropriate, not on forums as where i have been trying.

[Prescience500]

I petition Blizzard to support Linux by releasing Diablo 3 for it!

Seriously, the last AAA title for Linux was how long ago now? Of course, it depends on what you call AAA. Throw us a frickin bone here though, Blizzard. It wouldn't be hard.

As much as I would like for that to happen because I'm a fan of the Diablo series, I doubt it will. We need more market share among desktop users! Personally, I'm doing everything I can. I have a business degree and I use all of my knowledge I gained in school of marketing to "sell" linux to the right people who would ultimately like it and who i can be there for if they have issues. I'm also careful not to convert anyone who might not like it because not only would they not likely try it again, but they are likely to tell others of their negative experience.

[Yfrwlf]

Yes I agree. But there must be some issue with it (or just suits deciding it's not worth it based on that they've never heard of Linux) since they don't. I mean, Icculus was porting all UT games before, but they chose not do it anymore. And I agree that the OS X port shouldn't be overly hard to port to Linux, except that while OS X is an extremely controlled platform Linux is the most fragmented one there is.

Which is why standards like FreeDesktop.org and packaging/installer standards like Zero Install are so important.

A note on the latter: It's high time someone did packaging right. Adding repositories/PPAs and thus giving random software projects root access to my computer isn't what I call fun. You shouldn't have to be root to install most programs.

[RealNC]

Adding repositories/PPAs and thus giving random software projects root access to my computer isn't what I call fun. You shouldn't have to be root to install most programs.

In this day of "personal computing", this doesn't matter that much. Malware doesn't need root access since it's interested on your user data.