Intel Aiming For Their Gallium3D Driver To Be Viable By Mesa 19.2, Default By EOY 2019

[Lanz]

Wait for reasonable priced Navi cards instead. The next intel GPU card will be a flop as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740
" Released with enormous fanfare, the i740 proved to have disappointing real-world performance^[1], and sank from view after only a few months on the market"

I'll be waiting for reviews, don't worry. However, it's a little unfair to shred Intel's offering before it's even out, based on history. If we were to do that for AMD, we could say that Navi will be as disappointing as Vega was. "Wait for Vega" -> Vega arrives, performs worse than nVidia but needs twice the power -> "wait for Navi" -> ... I actually use a Vega 64, simply because I won't buy from nVidia due to their business practices, but I recognize that nVidia makes a better product.

[andre30correia]

Wait for reasonable priced Navi cards instead. The next intel GPU card will be a flop as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740
" Released with enormous fanfare, the i740 proved to have disappointing real-world performance^[1], and sank from view after only a few months on the market"

I hope not, more competion better for us

[Lanz]

I have to admit, I'm rather looking forward to Intel's discreet GPU.

[Space Heater]

I wonder - will this new driver support older iGPUs? Sandybridge, Haswell, etc?

An Intel driver developer has said that the reason for only supporting Broadwell and newer is that:

"...BDW+ supports 48-bit addressing which allows the CPU and GPU to share addresses trivially. This means no relocations are required and that's a great driver simplification and performance improvement."

[Kayden]

Has somebody tried gallium9? Does just work?

Venemo and dhewg did a bunch of work and got Starcraft II and Witcher 1 running via nine IIRC. So it ought to work. I haven't tried it personally yet.

[Michael]

I wonder - will this new driver support older iGPUs? Sandybridge, Haswell, etc?

I could use some Vulkan working on my old Sandybridge laptop

Nope. As mentioned in the article, the Gallium3D driver only supports as far back as Broadwell and will not go back further than that.

This also isn't a Vulkan driver, but just OpenGL. The Intel ANV Vulkan driver also isn't being extended back further than what it already does due to hardware requirements and not wasting resources on a half-baked driver for already slow hardware.

[dreamer_]

I wonder - will this new driver support older iGPUs? Sandybridge, Haswell, etc?

I could use some Vulkan working on my old Sandybridge laptop

[aufkrawall]

Isn't Intel Media Driver should be used instead of Mesa VAAPI implementation? As I understand it more advanced and also support Wayland.

VAAPI works with Radeons on Wayland, so the Mesa driver supports it as well.

[FireBurn]

Isn't Intel Media Driver should be used instead of Mesa VAAPI implementation? As I understand it more advanced and also support Wayland. It's packages and available in Ubuntu 19.04, including free and non-free version.

I ran vainfo against both versions (from git) and the Mesa one has more things listed

Here's the diff:

--- vainfo.i965 2019-04-25 15:48:39.633916428 +0100
+++ vainfo.iHD  2019-04-25 15:47:52.596016997 +0100
@@ -1,26 +1,20 @@
-vainfo: Driver version: Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Skylake - 2.4.0.pre1 (2.3.0-11-g881e67a)
+vainfo: Driver version: Intel iHD driver - 1.0.0
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.5 (libva 2.5.0.pre1)
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:        VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:        VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:        VAEntrypointFEI
-      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:        VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:        VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               :        VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264High               :        VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264High               :        VAEntrypointFEI
-      VAProfileH264High               :        VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileH264High               :        VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :        VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264Main               :        VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264Main               :        VAEntrypointFEI
-      VAProfileH264Main               :        VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileH264Main               :        VAEntrypointVLD
-      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :        VAEntrypointEncSlice
-      VAProfileH264MultiviewHigh      :        VAEntrypointVLD
-      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :        VAEntrypointEncSlice
-      VAProfileH264StereoHigh         :        VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :        VAEntrypointEncSlice
+      VAProfileHEVCMain               :        VAEntrypointFEI
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :        VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :        VAEntrypointEncPicture
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :        VAEntrypointVLD
@@ -28,9 +22,9 @@
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :        VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :        VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :        VAEntrypointVLD
+      VAProfileNone                   :        VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileNone                   :        VAEntrypointVideoProc
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            :        VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                :        VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              :        VAEntrypointVLD
-      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :        VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :        VAEntrypointVLD

[FireBurn]

Has somebody tried gallium9? Does just work?

Yes, works fine here