R600 Gallium3D Shader Compiler Milestone Hit

[droidhacker]

If ATI was to come out with a fully Gallium3D supported card at 65% performance of the blob and the following would be finished:
-OpenGL 3.2 (don't care if mesa or not)
-Suspend to RAM support
-Power saving
-Crossfire equivalent (or OpenGL for one card and the rest of the State Tracker goodness for the other card would be even better!)

I would pay for a 200-300 euro/dollar ATI card in a heartbeat!

A massive plus if:
-Accelerated video playback
-Accelerated audio playback
-SVG

Hear me AMD: I'd buy it right now!

Accelerated audio playback? Can a GPU even do this?

[droidhacker]

PS: And GLSL is a requirement too, but that's OpenGL to me...

I think that goes without saying... GLSL is a required component of opengl 2.0 and 3.x... without it you can't claim opengl>1.x

[BlackStar]

PS: And GLSL is a requirement too, but that's OpenGL to me...

GLSL is already in place and should be available in Mesa 7.8! Myself, I'd settle for GLSL and power management at this point. Crossfire is pretty useless (on Windows too, but esp. on Linux), suspend should be working already and SVG should come along with Gallium.

Which leaves video playback for last (actually 1080p playback because everything else works fine already). This front seems to have fallen off the radar right now, but you never know - maybe some hacker will come out and surprise us all!

[pvtcupcakes]

Accelerated audio playback? Can a GPU even do this?

Some graphics cards have an HDMI port with a built in audio controller.

[BlackStar]

Some graphics cards have an HDMI port with a built in audio controller.

Yup, all recent Ati cards have that, but I don't think you can actually use that chip to perform any audio processing. It's just a sink.

Nvidia cards only have audio passthrough that connect to the motherboard's / sound card's SPDIF output, so no acceleration possible there by definition.

[bridgman]

Yep, the 6xx and higher chips include an HD Audio controller whose digital outputs can be mixed with video on the HDMI connector, but there is no GPU-accelerated audio processing.

[blindfrog]

Isn't r600+ GLSL compiler basically going to be shared between gallium and classic mesa? Meaning working on it now is not going to "waste". That's the focus right now right? We all need cool ogl 2.0+ stuff :P

On a unrelated note Team Fortress 2(-dx8 mode) is playable, but still a bit glitchy with latest mesa. Nonetheless YAY! You code girls!

[V!NCENT]

Accelerated audio playback? Can a GPU even do this?

Decoding and such... Currently all crappy sound cards do their voodoo on the CPU...

What seperates cheap from costly cards is twofold:
-Propper sound processor
-Sound processor with x amount of channels

Imagine a studio type of sound processing done by the graphics card. Since the 'graphics' cards are becomming more or less the computers 'supa-calculatah' cards this would be awesome.

Some graphics cards have an HDMI port with a built in audio controller.

I want some proper sound output and thus I do not care about HDMI. Give me DVI + decent sound processing = epic win

Crossfire is pretty useless (on Windows too, but esp. on Linux),

Appart from giving me more FPS (Crysis) I would rather have a dedicated OpenGL 3.2 card for games and compositing and the rest of the State Tracker goodness, including OpenCL apps, on another dirt cheap, but still capable, ATI card.

Responsiveness for the win!

[pvtcupcakes]

Isn't r600+ GLSL compiler basically going to be shared between gallium and classic mesa? Meaning working on it now is not going to "waste". That's the focus right now right? We all need cool ogl 2.0+ stuff :P

On a unrelated note Team Fortress 2(-dx8 mode) is playable, but still a bit glitchy with latest mesa. Nonetheless YAY! You code girls!

Awesome news about TF2. I haven't tried it, but just a couple days ago I couldn't get Counter Strike Source to work in dx8. It did work in dx7 though.

The problem with CSS was that the menu background screen would come up and freeze. The menu itself wasn't there, just the background.

[pvtcupcakes]

Also about GLSL, last I heard is that the work already done will be able to apply to Gallium. So they should be able to get OpenGL 2.0 on Gallium fairly quickly.

Darn edit limit.