Mesa Support For OpenGL Geometry Shaders

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Support For OpenGL Geometry Shaders

An exciting message hit the Mesa mailing list on Friday morning concerning support for OpenGL geometry shaders...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE0Nzc

[pingufunkybeat]

This is really big!

OpenGL 3.3 is so close now!

[bofh80]

So way back in the day on windows 98 you could get some sort of software/emulated GPU to play say halflife on a machine that only had a silly ati rage card in it. It might have been something to do with glade, but i can't remember.

Anyway, keeping the same thing in mind, would it be possible to say have a geforce4, using it's normal blob driver, 2d / 3d capabilitie used to the max, but have something like mesa providing the parts (opengl 3 etc that the card does not support.

There by you don't loose any performance of your card, and you gain features, or can run games that wouldn't otherwise run.

Or is that farrr to complicated?


Let me know what u think. Even if it's "don't be stupid"

[Plombo]

So way back in the day on windows 98 you could get some sort of software/emulated GPU to play say halflife on a machine that only had a silly ati rage card in it. It might have been something to do with glade, but i can't remember.

Anyway, keeping the same thing in mind, would it be possible to say have a geforce4, using it's normal blob driver, 2d / 3d capabilitie used to the max, but have something like mesa providing the parts (opengl 3 etc that the card does not support.

There by you don't loose any performance of your card, and you gain features, or can run games that wouldn't otherwise run.

Or is that farrr to complicated?


Let me know what u think. Even if it's "don't be stupid"

To some extent, yes, you've basically given the definition of a software fallback. But it's not practical to implement software fallbacks for many things. OpenGL 3 is a huge feature set that isn't practical to implement in software for hardware that isn't DX10-class.

And it won't work for geometry shaders because they are between vertex and fragment shaders in the rendering pipeline.

[jakubo]

as far as i know a similar effect has been achieved on old intel chips, which by nature only supported up to OpenGL 1.4 but under the gallium driver manage 2.1 (i think)
now that it seems possible to distribute graphics processing across the whole system via dma-buf (or what the name was) i guess that missing GPU functionality could be provided by the CPU. but i guess performance would hardly exceed that of LLVMsoftpipe
but if it were possible (usefull) to give the GPU, due to missing hardware acceleration, some work via OpenCL back to make use the parallelisation in the GPU... i dunno

[vegto3773]

i am developing a game using glut and glsl.it gives me a number of errors if i use shaders(glxinfo gives opengl 3.0 and glsl 1.30 and the porgram should work).works perfectly without shaders or when using ati catalyst drivers.
games like overgrowth also crash giving glsl errors

[Plombo]

i am developing a game using glut and glsl.it gives me a number of errors if i use shaders(glxinfo gives opengl 3.0 and glsl 1.30 and the porgram should work).works perfectly without shaders or when using ati catalyst drivers.
games like overgrowth also crash giving glsl errors

This isn't a very good place to report problems with Mesa. Please do go to https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ and report the problems you are having in detail if you know of a bug in Mesa that needs fixing.

[calim]

Actually it's kind of working on nvc0 as well. Maybe a few glitches left though ...

[whizse]

i am developing a game using glut and glsl.it gives me a number of errors if i use shaders(glxinfo gives opengl 3.0 and glsl 1.30 and the porgram should work).works perfectly without shaders or when using ati catalyst drivers.
games like overgrowth also crash giving glsl errors

Overgrowth is buggy unfortunately, it doesn't specify a #version so it gets 1.10 by default. I've been meaning to try to convince the devs to fix that.

Anyway, if your shaders fail to compile, see what errors the compiler is giving you and fix the problems.