What Would You Like To See Out Of Mesa 8.1?

[allquixotic]

Whatever happened to that DX10/11? Probably the one thing I'm hoping to see emerge.

The Direct3d state trackers will not be particularly useful because:

• OSes that don't implement the full Gallium3d stack won't be able to take advantage of the state tracker(s). So basically that means only Linux.
• Hardware that doesn't use Gallium3d won't be able to take advantage of the state tracker(s). That means not only the proprietary drivers, but also one of the very major open source drivers: the officially-supported Intel "classic mesa" driver, which is supporting pretty good OpenGL 3.0 on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. This also excludes hardware for which proprietary driver support exists, but no open source support exists (e.g. Radeon HD7000, Nvidia "Kepler", both of which are probably many months away from being usable on Gallium3d.)
• Wine is the platform that could make particularly good use of these state trackers. Basically if you aren't trying to run pre-existing Windows software with these state trackers, you are wasting your time; as far as native programs are concerned, they all use OpenGL or GLES, not Direct3d. Even if suddenly we had a lot of worthwhile native programs written to the Direct3d API as exposed by Gallium3d, we'd still have the major issue that there is a severe lack of support for this state tracker compared to the level of effort that goes into the OpenGL / GLX state trackers. So you are very likely to experience missing features and bugs when running these state trackers -- moreso than if you use OpenGL.
• Because Wine is designed to run on non-Linux platforms (BSD, Mac OS X), and with non-Gallium3d drivers, the Wine developers consider the first two points above to be extremely major disadvantages.
• Wine already has a FANTASTIC translation layer between Direct3d (8 and 9 at least, with major progress being made on 10) and OpenGL. The accomplishments they've made in terms of performance, CPU usage reduction and driver compatibility over the past few years... it's astonishing. You can play high-end games like Skyrim and Star Trek Online under wine using a Gallium3d driver. If you told me this 3 years ago, I'd have laughed you to the other side of the world. Wine is NOT "done" its job yet, but it has come an incredibly long way in its journey to becoming a fully compatible Windows program emulator while offering near-native performance. I think we should let them keep going down that path without trying to change to an unproven technology.

[smitty3268]

How do you figure? No major architectural features were added in 3.0 that I can recall which weren't already _widely_ available in GL 2.1 drivers. Mostly little stuff, like just mandating the support for FP formats, adding texture arrays, VAOs, and extended FBOs -- all little stuff. Oh, on vertex transformation -- I guess that may have been a big one to implement.

How about a little thing like integer support, something that affects the entire driver pipeline? Not sure what you mean by "widely" available features - i mean from basic minimum support only GL 2.1, not the 2.1 but almost 3.0 support that was in Mesa 7.11.

Some ground support for geometry shaders has already been done, and there have been UBO patches floating around as well. I'm not minimizing the amount of work still ahead, but I would fully expect GL3.3 along with some early work on GL4 extensions in Mesa 8.3 as long as the Intel devs remain focused on adding that support.

[curaga]

Proper instancing -- including all the various other features in GL 3.1 you need to actually use instancing effectively -- is also going to be a really big item.

Instancing was supported even before 8.0.

[Dukenukemx]

[*]Wine already has a FANTASTIC translation layer between Direct3d (8 and 9 at least, with major progress being made on 10) and OpenGL. The accomplishments they've made in terms of performance, CPU usage reduction and driver compatibility over the past few years... it's astonishing. You can play high-end games like Skyrim and Star Trek Online under wine using a Gallium3d driver. If you told me this 3 years ago, I'd have laughed you to the other side of the world. Wine is NOT "done" its job yet, but it has come an incredibly long way in its journey to becoming a fully compatible Windows program emulator while offering near-native performance. I think we should let them keep going down that path without trying to change to an unproven technology.[/list]

I've tried running something simple like Portal 2, and the performance was terrible. To the point where exiting the game took a few minutes. Mind you I never tried any tweaks beyond installing Wine and proprietary drivers. I would really like to see some benchmarks on how fast games run in Wine. From what you just said, it seems I'm doing something very wrong then.

[Rabauke]

* i965: OpenGL 3 support for Intel's Ironlake/Arrandale platform

[AnonymousCoward]

7- work around for games that require S3TC (enable the workaround by default and out of the box) -- No, users don't like to recompile mesa just to enable this. (Fuck patents)

You just need to install libtxc-dxtn for that?

[whizse]

Saying that there's just several new revisions is really understating things. The differences between GL 3.0 and GL 2.1 were a lot smaller than the differences between GL 3.3 and 3.0, not to mention the differences between 4.2 and 3.0.

GL 3.2 will likely be the hardest revision to implement due to the requirement for an entire new geometry pipeline stage. 4.0 will also be hard, but I have a feeling that the various changes necessary to make plugging in new stages will be done during the GS updates, so hopefully that transition will be easier.

Personally, I'd like to see the DSA extension added to Mesa soon. It's available on both AMD's and NVIDIA's drivers, and it's really nice to have.

Intel is apparently planning for 3.1 or 3.2 for 8.1 so I guess they are a little more optimistic (or it might mean that 8.1 is still a long ways off).
Edit: Doh! Scratch that. I had it wrong, it was 3.1 for either 8.1 or 8.2.

Geometry shaders is supposed to be partly implemented, at least according to docs/GL3.txt

[whizse]

2- Full OpenGL 3/4+ support.

There's already full OpenGL 3 support...

[Nille]

r600g - better power management (runs ~10 degrees hotter than Windows while idling) plus fan speed control.

thats is an kernel thing not mesa

[DanL]

I'd like to see continued progress on the vdpau state tracker and OpenGL3.x.