Intel Continues With Mesa Changes For Valve

[Serafean]

I see the thread spinning off topic (again), so to end the discussion about screen savers : I shortened and thus completely lost the meaning of my catalyst complaint. It isn't specifically about screen savers, but about the screen power saving mode (aka DPMS standby). Once it drops there, I have to restart the PC.

I kind of get the impression that Valve's developers don't know openGL that well. They seem to know it well enough to use convert from D3D but that's about the extent of it. While OpenGL may be relatively difficult to use compared to something like D3D, making contributions to the library is incomparably harder; you can't just jump into it. I like to compare it to sending a rocket into space vs. sending a rocket into space and then making it land in a specific location somewhere else.

Point taken, and I'll be happy if they report bugs and help those in the know to fix them. If any Valve people are reading : I salute your efforts, this is a big win for linux. However, I'm inclining to being an OSS purist, and I'm beginning to have a problem when I have to install a blob, so take my comments with a grain of salt.

Serafean

[schmidtbag]

Do you seriously ask why someone likes $PRETTY? It's like asking why are they using a desktop wallpaper, when a black color works as well.

Normally I'd agree but a screensaver is just unnecessary - compiz is eye candy but a lot of it has functionality, and if you're going to use compiz for those extra abilities you might as well go all-out on graphics. With desktop wallpapers, it's just common sense to have a picture there because otherwise your screen is just blank with some icons here and there and images don't really affect performance no matter how crappy your system is. Screensavers however are just a waste of system resources, albiet not much but they tend to only show up when you're not around, so you could just save power by having the monitor turn off instead. It doesn't take long for an LCD screen to turn on.

One of the things I really liked about GNOME 2 is you could use screensavers as your desktop wallpaper and you could run programs on top of them. Set the "nice" level really low and you don't have to worry about the prettier screensavers eating up your CPU and GPU.

[archibald]

Do you seriously ask why someone likes $PRETTY? It's like asking why are they using a desktop wallpaper, when a black color works as well.

I tend to go for something that's not quite black, for the simple reason that it lets me see the edge of my screen instantly.

[curaga]

As for the Catalyst screensaver problem, why do you still use screensavers? Even CRTs made within the past 10 years don't need screensavers anymore.

Do you seriously ask why someone likes $PRETTY? It's like asking why are they using a desktop wallpaper, when a black color works as well.

[schmidtbag]

There are a few problems with this logic : going for the easy fix isn't always the right solution. Around the house I have a couple of PCs that would be useless without the OSS radeon driver (Don't forget AMD dropping pre HD5000 driver support recently), and one saved by the nouveau project.

They're not going for the easy fix, they're going for the most realistic way to get anything done on time with the best customer experience. Valve might not have any clue how far away (or how close) the OSS drivers are from handling their games the way they want/need them to. That's what makes this a waste of time for them, because it could take over a year for Valve to fix them and the company probably doesn't have the time, money, or interest to do such a thing, and honestly they don't have to. They didn't just port the game over and call it a day, they worked with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. That's not the same thing as an easy fix. I understand your problem about being forced to use OSS drivers for pre-HD5000 cards, however, if your GPU is good enough or you sincerely care that the OSS drivers aren't playing Valve's games, just don't upgrade your entire distro. You're still able to use the 3.4 (maybe even 3.5 kernel) and xserver 1.12, that should be good enough for the time being. I don't see the OSS drivers being valve-incompatible for very long.

Now, what I think would be crappy of Valve is to intentionally ignore the OSS drivers after they already released their products. If their linux devs have nothing better to do, why not tweak the OSS drivers to make them work?

I agree that Valve shouldn't fix the specific driver problems, but they could help within the common mesa stack, ie implementing new GLSL versions or something.

I kind of get the impression that Valve's developers don't know openGL that well. They seem to know it well enough to use convert from D3D but that's about the extent of it. While OpenGL may be relatively difficult to use compared to something like D3D, making contributions to the library is incomparably harder; you can't just jump into it. I like to compare it to sending a rocket into space vs. sending a rocket into space and then making it land in a specific location somewhere else.


As for your problems with nvidia blobs, yea, that's a potential security issue, but unless you do a lot of illegal activities or have a lot of people who hate you and know your exact setup, I'm pretty sure you don't need to worry for a while. As for the Catalyst screensaver problem, why do you still use screensavers? Even CRTs made within the past 10 years don't need screensavers anymore.

[Serafean]

For those who are whining that the radeon and noveau drivers arne't getting (as much) attention is just plain aggravating to me. Yes, they need improvement, but don't think that's why valve is ignoring them in the first place? That's like telling a doctor to heal someone with cancer when there's someone with the flu who can actually be healed quickly. I support the efforts of radeon and nouvea and they've made a lot of progress, but valve attempting to fix them is a waste of their time and resources when there's already a functioning and better performing alternative. I personally would prefer steam and the source engine be released within a month on blob drivers than wait a half year or more so they fix up the FOSS.

There are a few problems with this logic : going for the easy fix isn't always the right solution. Around the house I have a couple of PCs that would be useless without the OSS radeon driver (Don't forget AMD dropping pre HD5000 driver support recently), and one saved by the nouveau project.
I agree that Valve shouldn't fix the specific driver problems, but they could help within the common mesa stack, ie implementing new GLSL versions or something.
As for blobs being a funtional alternative, in my case both blobs are a tradeoff : nvidia doesn't support per screen DPMS settings (and it requires an excutable /tmp; still don't know why and I see it as a severe security issue), and Catalyst sometimes doesn't respond after screen saver activation. neither OSS drivers have these issues; the only thing they lack is performance and video decode (which btw I don't even get from my intel chip).
Sure make it work quick and dirty on blobs, but please work with OSS teams, since OSS drivers will remain (mostly functional) even after blob support has been dropped.

Serafean

[Hamish Wilson]

The radeon drivers still need MSAA, so they don't support everything for OpenGL 3.0 (almost everything though). I think there were some patches floating about that added MSAA support, but I'm not sure what happened to them.

Thanks for the clarification then. Still, not that large a leap is needed.

[AJSB]

I'm not 100% sure, but I remember a nouveou dev who told that it wouldn't be the best thing to do but that they would sign a NDA if nvidia would offer that, but nvidia doesn't.

He also told that you can write a FOSS driver with information covered by a NDA but that it's hard to do (iirc you aren't even allowed to comment the code).

IIRC, yes, there was one that said that about sign the NDA but there was another that said that he would not sign for it....there is clearly some divisions about it at Nouveau devs, and yeah, they could not even comment the code.

[V10lator]

they don't want to sign any NDA that could solve thje issue....

I'm not 100% sure, but I remember a nouveou dev who told that it wouldn't be the best thing to do but that they would sign a NDA if nvidia would offer that, but nvidia doesn't.

then again, sign the NDA will tint the FOSS...

He also told that you can write a FOSS driver with information covered by a NDA but that it's hard to do (iirc you aren't even allowed to comment the code).

[archibald]

I was under the impression that with Mesa 8.1 OpenGL 3.0 was pretty much done for most vendors?

The radeon drivers still need MSAA, so they don't support everything for OpenGL 3.0 (almost everything though). I think there were some patches floating about that added MSAA support, but I'm not sure what happened to them.