most complete opengl/webgl support with open-source drivers?

[aljosa]

i'm interested in current state of open-source drivers and any comments on current and future development of opengl/webgl support.
mostly i'm interested in what you think about current opengl support and, based on current development, what can be expected in future development regarding webgl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL)?

i currently have 3 cards (2 ati, 1 intel) and they all fallback to mesa support for webgl and i'm getting pretty bad performance so i'm interested what would you recommend (card or at least chip/model) that currently has excellent support?

i'm interested only in open-source drivers and especially mesa since i expect that most browsers will fallback to mesa because proprietary drivers support disappears with time when new xorg or kernel release breaks compatibility.

[marek]

I haven't tested WebGL, but we got a bug report against R300 Gallium3D and WebGL and it has been closed by the reporter as resolved. There are no other complains so I think WebGL just works with this driver.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29067

[aljosa]

any comments on current state of drivers, what would you buy if you need excellent opengl ES 2.0 support?

[whizse]

(I filed that bug).

WebGL seems to be working pretty well, both with r300g, and on Intel with i965. Keep in mind that you need a recent Xserver (1.9.x) for pbuffer support.

[V!NCENT]

Intel has pretty good floss only drivers, except for Poulsbo which is proprietary.

nVidia cards have Noveau, which is at the "Hey we got it working with Quake 3. It has 2fps but it doesn't crash anymore, w00t!"-point so that leaves only one type of cards:

Radeon cards. You do not want cards from the stonage without shaders and speed, but you also don't want the latest generation GPU's because next to nothing works yet.

Pick the oldest card out there that meets your demands, because the last stage of driver development is optmisation and feature completeness.

I narrowed it down to the range from Radeon 9800 pro to the upcomming driver awesomeness of the Radeon 4870.

Looking at the feature matrix of the Mesa Radeon driver I suggest the fastest Radeon with a r500 core, the Radeon X1950. That is an OpenGl 2.0 card. If you want a more capable card then you have to pick the best R600 card out there for OpenGL 3.0 support, which is a Radeon 3870.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature