Eight Reasons You Can Enjoy Mesa 8.0

[mark_]

This article makes me sick

A little deconstruction of your (as always) sickly optimistic article:

• New Hardware Support: If you want minimal support for your new card, have fun. For my old card, nothing changed and for you people with new cards: congratulations, your silicon may draw pictures.
• Overhauled VMware Driver: srsly? I don't know anybody who uses that, so I'm sure there are SO many rejoicing people out there, because of that feature. At least I am not one of those, so nothing changed.
• Video Improvements: I cannot remember exactly, but that was MPEG-2 only and still experimental, right? I did not have MPEG-2 problems before and I have none now, so nothing changed.
• Gallium3D State Trackers: yeah, Dx10/11 sure... but NOTHING uses that (-> wine? nope!), what else do we have? Some 2D acceleration, awesome. So nothing changed, right?
• LLVMpipe Enhanced: My hypothesis: nobody but developers use this, so nothing changed.
• Performance Improvements: $new_Intel_bridge (the only thing I read of in most of the last articles). Congratulations if you have such hardware, so basically, nothing changed for most people.
• Android Support: come on... who cares about telephones and other non-computers? Nothing changed for me.
• Many Other Enhancements: GLSL 1.3 being NEARLY there (so it is NOT, why do you even talk about it then?), and hundreds of thousands of billions of commits... yeah, but WHAT changed? As you fail to deliver some examples, nothing changed.

So here is my summary: there are SO many improvements, that my Radeon HD 4350 cannot play x264 with 720x476 resolution without judder, which was possible with my old Geforce 4 and the binary blob, and there are SO many improvements, that I still have to use OpenGL 2.1 with Mesa 8.0-devel (git-bd38459). Well, I bought a game console for games, screw 3D-Linux.
I know, there are many people working on it and I very appreciate it, and with gitstats I can see that they are working really hard around the clock and that there ARE more commits than ever to mesa, but the developers can't do magic and need much more time (I guess 5 years at least for my old card and in 5 years I will have a newer one, I am sure). So please stop being overly fanatic, enthusiastic and euphemistic (nearly complete aka not complete == totaly completed!1!!) about the "changes" in mesa, it makes me sick; e.g. OpenGL 3.0 can be used by 1-2 $new_intel_devices and most people still use about OpenGL 2.1, so don't always overgeneralize and talk about OpenGL 3.0 is the reality and it is so fantastic and awesome and blabla with a little disclaimer (if any) that this is hardware dependent. I don't know which drugs you are using, but I guess I need those too, to be causeless happy like you all the time.

[ChrisXY]

A little deconstruction of your (as always) sickly optimistic article:

It's funny because recently so many people have complained that Michael's articles are too negative.

[*]Overhauled VMware Driver: srsly? I don't know anybody who uses that, so I'm sure there are SO many rejoicing people out there, because of that feature. At least I am not one of those, so nothing changed

Well, I tried. Since I recently wanted to try some games I put a Windows hard disk in my laptop and my linux hard disk in a USB case (since in 2012 Windows still cannot boot from USB disks. On the first boot after I changed hard disks I accidentally booted linux again from the USB disk. It worked out of the box). Linux on a physical disk in VMWare player works very well too.
But while the vmwgfx code in the kernel, in libdrm git and mesa git is probably good the stable X driver only uses a fallback on some legacy and the git X driver won't compile:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?68063-I-wanted-to-try-the-new-vmwgfx-stuff-but

So I personally appreciate this. But I cannot even compile a necessary component...

[*]Gallium3D State Trackers: yeah, Dx10/11 sure... but NOTHING uses that (-> wine? nope!), what else do we have? Some 2D acceleration, awesome. So nothing changed, right?

"Mesa, DRI, and EGL state trackers"?? Did you even read all of that?

[*]Performance Improvements: $new_Intel_bridge (the only thing I read of in most of the last articles). Congratulations if you have such hardware, so basically, nothing changed for most people.

"for the various drivers"??

[*]Android Support: come on... who cares about telephones and other non-computers? Nothing changed for me.

I personally would like it when all android devices used mesa and thus all those android graphics drivers would be improved at the same time. Why don't we have truly smooth scrolling on highend smartphones in 2012?

So here is my summary: there are SO many improvements, that my Radeon HD 4350 cannot play x264

x264 is an implementation of a h264 encoder...?

with 720x476 resolution without judder, which was possible with my old Geforce 4 and the binary blob,

Great, use fglrx and vaapi. Or don't.

While I never had a HD 42xx I have had a Pentium 4 (3ghz) with a radeon x300 (very low-end, even then) and I never had video playing problems there with xv. Only full hd was not always smooth, but that was CPU bound I guess.

and there are SO many improvements, that I still have to use OpenGL 2.1 with Mesa 8.0-devel (git-bd38459). Well, I bought a game console for games, screw 3D-Linux.

I don't get your problem. Most of OpenGL 3.0+ is supported anyway, it's just not complete. But OpenGL often doesn't need that completeness. Mesa can run Unigine Heaven!! And Portal 2 in wine is even very well playable with my HD 6550M. And even Skyrim is rendered correctly as far as I can see it, though that needs a serious speedup.

(nearly complete aka not complete == totaly completed!1!!) about the "changes" in mesa, it makes me sick; e.g. OpenGL 3.0 can be used by 1-2 $new_intel_devices and most people still use about OpenGL 2.1,

But nearly complete means that you can use many features from OpenGL above 2.1, just not all. But often even enaugh...

[AnonymousCoward]

Video Improvements: It's not using the NVIDIA PureVideo or AMD Unified Video Decoder engines -- instead using GPU shaders -- but another 8.0 feature is the video accelerated playback support improvements within Gallium3D.

When are we finally going to see accelerated H.264 decode? It seems to me like this acclerated video decode thing is developed at a snail's pace

[Sidicas]

While I never had a HD 42xx I have had a Pentium 4 (3ghz) with a radeon x300 (very low-end, even then) and I never had video playing problems there with xv. Only full hd was not always smooth, but that was CPU bound I guess.

Yea, I have similar hardware.. And it's pretty much the same story for ALL OSs.. However, there is VDPAU support under Linux, unlike all the other OSs for our graphics chips r300g which should drastically drop CPU usage on those hd videos making them playable.. It's not completely finished, but it's something no other OS has. I just wished that they focused on things that Linux doesn't have that all other OSs do have, like MSAA for our graphics chips, rather than focusing so much on things that no other OS has. (MLAA, VDPAU on Radeon hardware, etc.).. But that's just my opinion.

Either way, progress is progress.

[Sidicas]

When are we finally going to see accelerated H.264 decode? It seems to me like this acclerated video decode thing is developed at a snail's pace

Good question... I think the short answer is that it's *REALLY* hard to do, especially on older hardware. I'm still very surprised they would even attempt something like that on older hardware, but they do list it as *MOSTLY* complete on r300g which is pretty cool because it's really never been done before on a lot of hardware, even in the proprietary drivers.