ATI R300g / R600g Unify Their Vertex Buffer Manager

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI R300g / R600g Unify Their Vertex Buffer Manager

Hitting the Mesa tree this weekend were messages of "r600g: use the new vertex buffer manager" and "r300g: use the new vertex buffer manager."..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTA4Mw

[DanL]

Code reuse is awesome and so is Marek. I wish I had something more to add :\ I'm imsomniacking.

[NomadDemon]

excuse my ignorance but...
what changes for normal users?

[Welsh Dwarf]

excuse my ignorance but...
what changes for normal users?

Today? nothing much, maybe an integration bug or two that'll need to be flushed out by testers.

Tomorrow? Unifying the code bases means that you avoid having to do double the work to add features/optimisations to each driver, you avoid having the two branches of the code diverge to the point that dual patching would become a pain and all this time gained can be used to improve other parts of the drivers (or, heaven forbid, allow the devs to have a life outside of open source ati drivers ).

[unimatrix]

Not only does this do nothing for the end users. I'm pretty sure most people have moved on to newer GPUs already. I mean r300 is absolutely prehistoric. I have an r700 which is barely ever mentioned on phoronix and I'm already thinking of replacing it with something more up to date.

[archibald]

Not only does this do nothing for the end users. I'm pretty sure most people have moved on to newer GPUs already. I mean r300 is absolutely prehistoric. I have an r700 which is barely ever mentioned on phoronix and I'm already thinking of replacing it with something more up to date.

Refactoring code to ease maintainability doesn't have a direct end-user benefit. It helps the devs by making their lives easier and allowing a bugfix in R600g to help R300g too. Nobody loses here.

R700 cards are driven by the R600{c|g} driver, so news that affects your card is fairly regular.

[blaze33]

Not only does this do nothing for the end users. I'm pretty sure most people have moved on to newer GPUs already. I mean r300 is absolutely prehistoric. I have an r700 which is barely ever mentioned on phoronix and I'm already thinking of replacing it with something more up to date.

Having a 5 year old laptop with an X600 card I'm glad to see there is still work going on in the r300 driver. Wouldn't it be for Linux I would have been forced to throw it away 3 years ago after some partial hardware failure (corrupted acpi support).

Considering that there's no more official ati support for r300 hardware i'm happy with this kind of news. Being still able to use the latest software I really do much more with my computer now than some years ago.

[?John?]

Code reuse is awesome and so is Marek. I wish I had something more to add :\

Agreed.

Thanks a million, Marek. Keep up the good work and don't forget about my promise that if we ever meet, then all the beer you can drink is on me

[evolution]

[Rant] Is it supposed these commits have a higher priority for older hardware (R300)?

First of all... I'm really happy there's a lot of development in the OS community to have proper OS out of box support for AMD/ATI hardware , and I'd like to send some kudos to Marek and Bridgman for their amazing work within the OS ATI driver development. I also hope in the near future I can replace Catalyst by this lighter driver in my computer systems (3 computers with ATI HD cards). (Btw, will we have someday proper HW video acceleration on r600+ cards with xf86-ati...?)

But, at the same time, I think not everything is bright: I wouldn't like to rant but, why does the main development of OS drivers happens on old hardware? Is it supposed to be like that?
That way I think Linux will never be competitive against Windows/Mac OS video driver stacks... But that's just my personal opinion...

Btw, keep up with good work Xorg community!

Cheers

[TechMage89]

The driver stack is still playing catch-up as the devs learn how to write a Gallium3D driver on hardware they already understand. Don't worry, support is getting closer to release. I hope in a few years we'll start getting release day support.