Gallium3D Support For Stream Out Arrives

On the same-day as publishing new Gallium3D benchmarks of the ATI R300g driver, we have more Gallium3D news to share. Zack Rusin has just announced a new Gallium3D branch that provides support for "Stream Out" with this advanced graphics driver architecture.

Stream Out is a feature formally introduced with DirectX 10.0 hardware and it provides support for storing primitives in a buffer with the data being output directly from a Geometry/Vertex Shader before the rasterization stage. Data can be (optionally) copied back to the CPU then for reading back. This is also known as a transform feedback in OpenGL. A few more technical details can be found in the Gallium3D documentation. A few technical bits on the OpenGL transform feedback mode can be found on this NVIDIA developer page.

Zack's comical announcement of this Stream Out support for Gallium3D can be found in this mailing list thread. Look for it to be merged to master soon for Mesa 7.9. The individual Gallium3D hardware drivers, however, still need to implement the actual capabilities on supported graphics processors.