Intel Expresses Interest In AMD's Mantle API

[pixo]

My understanding is that we already have a low lever api used for all 3 vendors, Gallium3D API.
Is it too low level for use by game engine devs?
It would be great if it was pushed as standard.

[przemoli]

My understanding is that we already have a low lever api used for all 3 vendors, Gallium3D API.
Is it too low level for use by game engine devs?
It would be great if it was pushed as standard.

Gallium is tool to build better drivers. Mesa is FLOSS implementation. That mean huge stability outside, not so much inside.
Unsuitable for games.

[brosis]

Gallium is tool to build better drivers. Mesa is FLOSS implementation. That mean huge stability outside, not so much inside.
Unsuitable for games.

On Radeon, its fast, stable and plays games very fast.

[log0]

My understanding is that we already have a low lever api used for all 3 vendors, Gallium3D API.
Is it too low level for use by game engine devs?
It would be great if it was pushed as standard.

I could be totally wrong, but looking at gallium/include/pipe/p_context.h, the calls there (the few I've compared) look very D3D10 like.

I mean function names and parameters (resource_copy_region -> ResourceCopyRegion, create/delete/bind_*_state -> Create/Delete/Bind*State, ...). There are of course some differences too (set_constant_buffer -> PsSetConstantBuffers, VsSetConstantBuffers).

Also I remember reading that TGSI (Gallium3D IR) is inspired by D3D10/11 bytecode.

So writing against Gallium would be like writing against D3D10? This would also explain the existence of a Direct3D 10 state tracker.

[curaga]

Tell me about it. I only knew GL when I first started hacking around gallium, and I was constantly wondering why the heck they used these weird names and conventions for everything that did not make sense.