OpenGL 3.1 Not Likely In Mesa Until 2013

[darkbasic]

Support in Mesa != Support in drivers.

Support in mesa means drivers will support it in ~6months.

At the same time we need power management

Done (Intel)

performance

WIP (Intel)

OCL

WIP

hw decoding

Done (Intel)

so I guess that only a little minority of us would really need OGL 4.x over all these feature.

But we need 3.2

PS. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge only support OGL 3.x so I think that Intel isn't directly interested in supporting OGL 4.x.

They are already working on Haswell...

[Nedanfor]

Why not? It would nice being able to play OilRush at the highest quality... but again performances are the main issue. Also we need at least 3.2 to get the best from wine.

Support in Mesa != Support in drivers. At the same time we need power management, performance, OCL, hw decoding, etc. etc. so I guess that only a little minority of us would really need OGL 4.x over all these feature.

PS. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge only support OGL 3.x so I think that Intel isn't directly interested in supporting OGL 4.x.

[darkbasic]

Why? Do you really need OGL 4.2 now?

Why not? It would nice being able to play OilRush at the highest quality... but again performances are the main issue. Also we need at least 3.2 to get the best from wine.

[airlied]

I did a piglit run on fglrx the other day,

http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/piglit/fglrx-r600/

so we can say we are a lot better in terms of actually passing tests :-)

That is a piglit run from two AMD drivers a year apart.

but really its only Intel working a lot on core mesa at the moment, with others expending time as jobs allow. Its not as is Red Hat can ship GL3.0 drivers anyways so working on them isn't a great spend of our time. and working on GL doesn't get you CL or video decode or anything. Also it not as if Red Hat can ship video decoders, so again no reason for us to invest heavily in them.

Perhaps some of the distros that do ignore patents could invest more in these.

[89c51]

Why? Do you really need OGL 4.2 now?

probably not (though it'd be good to have) but i thing the FOSS stack needs Video Acceleration, OpenCL, bug fixing, and all the other things that are left behind due to lack of manpower.

[Nedanfor]

mesa desperately needs someone with deep pockets to back it up

Why? Do you really need OGL 4.2 now?

[89c51]

mesa desperately needs someone with deep pockets to back it up

[Michael]

All that said, Now would be a good time for the core Mesa team to begin approaching companies like Valve, AMD, and EA.

F

Valve will hopefully be doing some things... Well, they have already been doing some things to the point that the Intel guys already promised me at least a beer at XDS in September for getting some things arranged with them

[russofris]

All that said, Now would be a good time for the core Mesa team to begin approaching companies like Valve, AMD, and EA.

F

[elanthis]

I can't understand it. Mesa has so great support from Intel, Red Hat and others big giants of IT, and they couldn't implement 3 years old specs, where nVidia and AMD could do it in so short time. What is the main reason? No so much ppl or money for work?

FOSS projects do not have a lot of developers. The idea that there are millions of people willing to contribute to FOSS may be true in the broadest sense, but it's certainly not true when you narrow things down to the actually important, useful, and/or relevant FOSS projects.

If you add up all of the people actively working on Mesa, GNOME, the desktop-related bits of the kernel, X11/Wayland, glibc and the rest of the core GNU system, and so on, you will still not have as many people as Microsoft has test engineers. The last goofy little 6-month 2D game project I worked on had a larger team than all of Mesa has.

Companies that actually make large profits can hire tons of $120k+/year developers. FOSS gets the scraps; a handful of paid engineers that the low-profit FOSS companies can afford, a number of hobbyists working part-time after work, and a shitload of whiny self-entitled users who bitch and moan constantly about a free OS while contributing absolutely nothing.

Developers with the necessary many years of experience and who can work 40+ hours/week do not often pop out of nowhere and start writing code for FOSS projects instead of working full-time at a proprietary software house. Somebody somewhere needs to be tossing them six-figures plus benefits every year. The most well-off FOSS company may be Red Hat -- they hit $1B yearly revenue (note: that's not profit) last year, or an average of $250M per quarter. AMD has a quarterly revenue of around $1.5B while Intel gets around $2.7B per quarter. Google managed $10B last quarter. Microsoft, on the other hand, pulls in almost $20B in quarterly revenue while Apple pulled in just shy of $40B last quarter. Needless to say, there's a shitload more highly experienced and talented developers at the big proprietary companies than there are at the little FOSS shops.