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Using OpenGL Without An X Server With NVIDIA

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  • Using OpenGL Without An X Server With NVIDIA

    Phoronix: Using OpenGL Without An X Server With NVIDIA

    Recent releases of NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver support creating OpenGL contexts outside of the X Server...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    This would be interesting, to say the least. You could create a gaming system that just boots directly into a game.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
      This would be interesting, to say the least. You could create a gaming system that just boots directly into a game.
      Theoretically improving performance as the game is rendered directly to the monitor, with no overhead of the X server except maybe with calls to the X libs directly, depending on how the game's coded. This could lead to more games that can be coded to use OGL directly rather than going thru the X server...less prone to problems.

      If this pans out I am sure Intel and AMD will follow suit, and maybe standard Direct OGL libs could be developed to standardize the OGL library calls in the different vendors' drivers (opensource or blob)

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      • #4
        Well, they certainly took their bloody time building proper EGL support. If they had chosen open stack, their users would have had that for ages

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        • #5
          Originally posted by DeepDayze View Post

          Theoretically improving performance as the game is rendered directly to the monitor, with no overhead of the X server except maybe with calls to the X libs directly, depending on how the game's coded. This could lead to more games that can be coded to use OGL directly rather than going thru the X server...less prone to problems.

          If this pans out I am sure Intel and AMD will follow suit, and maybe standard Direct OGL libs could be developed to standardize the OGL library calls in the different vendors' drivers (opensource or blob)
          While it is interesting from an accelerated OpenGL point-of-view, you would probably have other issues, specifically user input. Most libraries (SDL, directly on X, etc) relies on some sort of window manager/x-server to handle the input further down. I'm not sure though, perhaps libinput could solve this issue, and allow for more direct input handling. Somebody correct me if I'm mistaken and have misunderstood the architecture.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
            This would be interesting, to say the least. You could create a gaming system that just boots directly into a game.
            What about Xrandr? How are you going to output the picture to the display? Or multiple displays? What about custom refresh rates?

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            • #7
              Originally posted by birdie View Post
              What about Xrandr?
              ...Do you not understand the point of this? Why would you need xrandr if you don't have X?
              How are you going to output the picture to the display? Or multiple displays?
              How am I supposed to know? Unless I misunderstood something, apparently nvidia has already figured that out. There are ways to view image files and PDFs from CLI tools, so I don't see why nvidia couldn't do the same.
              What about custom refresh rates?
              Most games already accommodate this.
              Last edited by schmidtbag; 23 January 2016, 07:48 PM.

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              • #8
                Someone keeps talking pure lunacy and BS here but why would I care?

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                • #9
                  Cool! now all that's missing is KMS/DRM support and wayaland support on nvidia proprietary drivers is complete! Nice timing! maybe they'll make it in time for when gnome and kde fully support wayland!

                  But even with this support, I assume that there are no existing applications that can use this opengl support right now, right?

                  Also, with this development, I'm beginning to wonder if we will need a display server at all if everyone starts supporting this... Desktop Environments could just jump straight into well... running on top of the opengl drivers. Not that I think people will actually do that (it's obviously a lot of work to create proper display server functionality, better just use wayland) but it's an interesting thought.

                  How are they doing this without DRM?
                  Last edited by rabcor; 23 January 2016, 09:15 PM.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by birdie View Post
                    Someone keeps talking pure lunacy and BS here but why would I care?
                    How about you elaborate instead of being passive-aggressive? It's not my fault your head is caught up in things irrelevant to this, such as X11.

                    Also, you apparently do care, because for whatever reason you seemed somewhat offended by my original post. Not only that, there's the link siavashserver posted, so I'll be waiting for what you think is so BS.
                    Last edited by schmidtbag; 23 January 2016, 11:38 PM.

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