Mesa Kills Old Hardware Support: No More 3dfx Voodoo

[bridgman]

If it makes you feel any better, I bought a 3DFx card so my *nephew* could play Q2...

[DeepDayze]

Time moves on!

Still, I remember buying a 3dfx card just so I could play quake/q2/arena in Linux in undergrad. Fuck I'm getting old! ;-)

I looked in my spare parts box and found a Creative Banshee 32MB VRAM 3dfx based card...that card still works so might build my "crap system" using an old Intel SE440BX board and 384MB RAM :-)

[Tgui]

If it makes you feel any better, I bought a 3DFx card so my *nephew* could play Q2...

Well, at least you're good to your nephew!

[Tgui]

I looked in my spare parts box and found a Creative Banshee 32MB VRAM 3dfx based card...that card still works so might build my "crap system" using an old Intel SE440BX board and 384MB RAM :-)

I'm not sure I know where my old 3dfx card is, though I do puzzle over the 5 inch VGA patch cable every couple years or so when I come across it.

[randomizer]

Here's another instance of praised backwards compatibility in Linux.

Not enough man power? Ditch it!

If they don't work, removing them doesn't change compatibility at all.

I would say these drivers could be maintained out of the tree though, so maybe there might be a parallel 7.11 mesa-legacy branch for those old legacy drivers.

Someone has already moved them into their own legacy branch. Whether they end up getting someone to maintain them is another thing entirely.

[dungeon]

That means roughly 10% of loc vanished. That's a pretty impressive cleanup.

58+1336+35852+85811+8+885+2104+436+675+2035+16=129 216

100/(830969/129216)=15.5500385694

~16% by Ian Romanick



And Marball Odyssey which coming to Linux use GL_EXT_paletted_texture/GL_OES_compressed_paletted_texture.

Just six months ago:

I have no objection to removing this feature (and those drivers).

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-March/005713.html

[BlackStar]

58+1336+35852+85811+8+885+2104+436+675+2035+16=129 216

100/(830969/129216)=15.5500385694

~16% by Ian Romanick



And Marball Odyssey which coming to Linux use GL_EXT_paletted_texture/GL_OES_compressed_paletted_texture.

Modern GPUs do not support GL_EXT_paletted_texture in hardware. In fact no AMD GPU has ever supported this feature, no Nvidia GPU since the 6x00 series and no Intel IGP.

This feature would have to be emulated in shaders, which is both inefficient and stupid, considering (a) that noone should be using 8bit textures in 2011, (b) the workaround is trivial (convert to 16bit or 32bit textures on load), (c) that the amount of work necessary for this feature is ridiculous and (d) that the manpower is as limited as it is.

Do you really propose adding obsolete GL 1.1 features instead of working towards GL 3.0?

Just six months ago:



http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ch/005713.html

I hope the developer has added a workaround, because paletted textures are not supported in 95% of the desktop cards in circulation right now.

[JanC]

(...) paletted textures are not supported in 95% of the desktop cards in circulation right now.

I wonder if it's still used/supported in some embeded hardware though?

[curaga]

I thought it was supported on the mobile ones? It's a pretty good way to reduce texture sizes in vram.

[BlackStar]

It's quite possible that some mobile GPUs may support the OES version of the extension (which is quite different than the old desktop one) but I don't know how universal that support is.

Note that regular texture compression can net you larger gains than 8bpp textures and with much higher color depths to boot (i.e. s3tc compresses 24bpp images down to 4bpp). Alternatively, you can emulate paletted textures in shaders and enjoy much higher flexibility than driver emulation: maybe your sprites only need 4bpp? Or 10bpp? Translucency? Shaders can do all that.