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Introducing The Cairo Gallium3D State Tracker

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  • Introducing The Cairo Gallium3D State Tracker

    Phoronix: Introducing The Cairo Gallium3D State Tracker

    In past days we have reported on the work being done at the moment for improving the ATI R300 GLSL compiler and kernel mode-setting support for old 3Dlabs GPUs by students participating in the X.Org project with Google's Summer of Code. Igor Trindade Oliveira, another GSoC student developer, has blogged about the work he is doing this summer on creating a Gallium3D state tracker for Cairo...

    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
    Whatever happened to Glitz? I sure hope this will be a Cairo backend that actually will be used in the future and not end up as another dead project.

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    • #3
      Is anyone here familar with the Cairo dev?

      My understanding is that Cairo doesn't support using OpenVG as yet. Has this changed? My information came from following Inkscape development awhile back so things may have changed, or I may have misunderstood...

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      • #4
        I have to question whether we need a Gallium3D state tracker for *everything*. I mean, doesn't it make more sense to put more resources into developing the Cairo OpenGL backend, which is more broadly compatible, and the Xorg/Xrender state tracker, which could accelerate Cairo on the current Xlib/Xcb backend?

        I think there's a real weakness in trying to shove everything into the state tracker layer. I think it might even be a layering violation.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by TechMage89 View Post
          I have to question whether we need a Gallium3D state tracker for *everything*.
          Yes, true.

          Right now it also looks like he's just focusing on making it work with the Softpipe driver, but not any of the hardware drivers yet or even the interesting LLVMpipe.
          And I wonder what effort needs to be done on the driver side?



          Originally posted by TechMage89 View Post
          . I mean, doesn't it make more sense to put more resources into developing the Cairo OpenGL backend, which is more broadly compatible, and the Xorg/Xrender state tracker, which could accelerate Cairo on the current Xlib/Xcb backend?
          Actually, there is a new OpenGL backend for cairo, replacing and being faster than glitz.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by monraaf View Post
            Whatever happened to Glitz?
            Glitz had some shortcomings. And a "dead upstream".

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            • #7
              Isn't Glitz basically XRender implemented on OpenGL ?

              If so, implementing Cairo over Glitz over OpenGL doesn't seem like something you would want to do today when there are better alternatives. Running Cairo directly over XRender or directly over OpenGL would seem like a better alternative than stacking the two, and if both of those APIs are implemented over Gallium3D anyways (we're not there today but..) then going straight to G3D seems viable as well.

              In the end I guess it's all going to boil down to whether G3D can do as good a job of hiding hardware differences as is hoped - if the state trackers have to be heavily tweaked to work over a new G3D driver then one of the other APIs *might* provide more independence, not sure.
              Test signature

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              • #8
                Actually, there is a new OpenGL backend for cairo, replacing and being faster than glitz.
                I know, and I think this a great thing, which is why I question the need for yet another way to accelerate Cairo rendering.

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                • #9
                  Since Gallium3D is only for DX9-level cards and up, the Gallium3D state tracker will be able to use more programmable features than the regular OpenGL backend, and without the overhead of producing and compiling GLSL or OpenCL shaders. So, it really could be a lot faster.

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