Better Multi Indirect Draw Support Coming To Mesa

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 1 January 2016 at 08:05 AM EST. 5 Comments
MESA
Ilia Mirkin has seemingly not taken much time off from his Mesa hacking for the holidays. On Thursday this developer who most frequently works on the Nouveau and Freedreno drivers has published patches for better ARB_multi_draw_indirect handling.

The GL_ARB_multi_draw_indirect extension is mandated by OpenGL 4.3. Core Mesa and all of the key drivers have already handled this extension with the exception of Nouveau NV50. However, Mirkin is hoping to enhance the implementation.

He commented on the mailing list, "The current support in mesa for ARB_multi_draw_indirect is pretty shameful... it just does N separate draws. Instead make it possible for drivers to handle this in a more efficient manner. Also create the backend interfaces necessary to support ARB_indirect_parameters, although the (trivial) frontend bits are not part of this series. Of course right now st/mesa will still break up the multidraw into N draws since no backends actually support this. And there are no piglits (other than one in images) which actually make use of glMultiDraw*Indirect... oh well."

The patches add about 200 lines of new code. If you are not familiar with the Mesa multi indirect draw support, visit the OpenGL.org registry.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week