Mesa's New Extension For Game Developers Merged

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's New Extension For Game Developers Merged

Intel has been working to improve Linux gaming and as part of that earlier this year they published the GLX_MESA_query_renderer extension. The purpose of this GLX extension is to provide more system -- particularly graphics-related -- information than what's easily accessible right now. Just before the Mesa 10.0 branching, support for this useful extension was merged...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTUwNzc

[c117152]

Hackish and messy doesn't cover it. The engine devs are literally parsing text strings against a database to determine what the GPU is capable off instead of having the driver announce it like this extension does.

[leif81]

Is this related to Carmack's recent tweet?

"Every GL driver should have to implement a const char * glEnumString( glEnum e ) instead of making thousands of developers do poor ones."

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/398479164178571265

[Kostas]

Haven't followed its development but from what I remember from the Intel guy's presentation it should be (potentially) fairly major for Linux gaming development. Surprised it hasn't received more attention.

[hiryu]

kwin

Isn't something like this what the kwin developers wanted a ways back? Martin Gr??lin should be happy about this news.

[Ancurio]

Is this related to Carmack's recent tweet?

"Every GL driver should have to implement a const char * glEnumString( glEnum e ) instead of making thousands of developers do poor ones."

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/st...79164178571265

No, that was about having a function that gives you a string representation of a GL enum. And it's a stupid idea in the same way that each driver stack shouldn't be implementing matrix algebra: those things should be left to independent shared utility libraries.

[oibaf]

0 A.D. already support it: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/14130