New OpenGL driver soon? (ET: QW... just read)

[Xipeos]

Expect the new OpenGL driver and therefore a huge performance boost anytime this year starting in August.

This new engine may be not-so-little but too late, since Mt. Evans (OpenGL 3.0) is supposed to come out in Octomber. I just hope that we won't have to wait several years for updated support this time.

Does anyone know more on OpenGL 3.0 and ati?

[d2kx]

New Direct3D support can always be added fast because the specification etc. is done month before. But there are not many information about OpenGL 3.0 for the driver programmer, yet. That's what people say, so I guess that it might come in 2008.

But: it takes some time until someone even wants to use OpenGL 3.0 and this time the linux driver should get OpenGL 3.0 support together with the Windows driver, because they're using the same OpenGL driver soon AFAIK.

[glisse]

New Direct3D support can always be added fast because the specification etc. is done month before. But there are not many information about OpenGL 3.0 for the driver programmer, yet. That's what people say, so I guess that it might come in 2008.

But: it takes some time until someone even wants to use OpenGL 3.0 and this time the linux driver should get OpenGL 3.0 support together with the Windows driver, because they're using the same OpenGL driver soon AFAIK.

OpenGL 3.0 will be a lot easier from a driver writer point of view while taking out the best of it will likely be a bit harder from application point of view. And AMD and others manufacturer likely already have draft of GL 3.0 and there is already enough on opengl.org to see what it will looks like, what is needed for driver and how good it is. I am really impatient to use this new API (which looks a lot better than D3D 10 to me)

[Svartalf]

And AMD and others manufacturer likely already have draft of GL 3.0 and there is already enough on opengl.org to see what it will looks like, what is needed for driver and how good it is.

Considering that ATI, Intel, and NVidia all have employees sitting on the ARB as representatives, they're already aware of what is in the spec. The clincher will be what needs to be done to implement the 3.0 functionalities in the driver. I wouldn't begin to know or tell you who's ready- especially with the recent issues with the G80 cards from NVidia...

[glisse]

Considering that ATI, Intel, and NVidia all have employees sitting on the ARB as representatives, they're already aware of what is in the spec. The clincher will be what needs to be done to implement the 3.0 functionalities in the driver. I wouldn't begin to know or tell you who's ready- especially with the recent issues with the G80 cards from NVidia...

I believe that's not as big as a whole rewrite (at least for NVidia) my feeling is that Long Peak will expose lower layer that should already be present in today driver for instance all the object things & synchronization looks a lot like what a memory manager should implements. In the meantime many old functions already implemented would be reuse like all the glsl stack and other functions which deals with the hw (hey the hw did not change just the API). So its more like writting new glue btw existing low level hw functions and the new API. But this is still quite a lot of work, and i am sure people at Tungsten are already thinking on how to bring this into mesa (and likely already working on that), i hope our memory manager will be updated a bit as i got the feeling that we miss some of the functionalities of Long Peak.

[Extreme Coder]

but when is ET:QW actually going to be released? Is there an estimate?

[Michael]

but when is ET:QW actually going to be released? Is there an estimate?

It will be released in the United States next month (August 10). Or so that's what GameStop.com says where I pre-ordered it. The Linux client should follow a few days later.

[Raven3x7]

I wouldn't count on that. Its possible but my guess is late August/ early September. The netcode and servers dont seem ready yet. And punkbuster just made things worse(although it was just introduced so that was to be expected i guess)

[d2kx]

Yep. The "server is full" bug is not fixed for me even with Update v1.1. But it's not that ET:QW is a buggy game. BF2142 is a lot of fun, but has way more bugs than the ET:QW beta.