The Gallium3D R600 Driver Now Has Texture Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Gallium3D R600 Driver Now Has Texture Support

There's good news for those interested in the open-source Gallium3D driver for the ATI R600/R700 (Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series) graphics cards: the R600g driver is beginning to work. While there's been the classic Mesa R600/R700 driver for months now that is working fine for most users, once finished the Gallium3D version should offer better performance, better OpenGL support (OpenGL 2.1 support off the bat, but that's still a ways behind OpenGL 4.1), and many other possibilities via Gallium3D's different state trackers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODQ1Mg

[pingufunkybeat]

I've been itching to try this. I believe that this is the last major architectural change left after the migration to KMS and TTM, the in-kernel power saving etc.

[Craig73]

Why is there a custom GLSL compiler? Wouldn't this be in the OpenGL state tracker (compiling it into Gallium3D IR) and thus already available and/or common to all Gallium3D drivers???

[With there perhaps a LLVM based optimizing compiler to compile Gallium3D IR into efficient hardware commands at the lowest layers]

[my apologies for the double post / I posted an expanded question on the previous article... http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...25#post138646]

[Hephasteus]

Go ATI. It's coming together roughshod but it's coming together.

[bridgman]

Why is there a custom GLSL compiler? Wouldn't this be in the OpenGL state tracker (compiling it into Gallium3D IR) and thus already available and/or common to all Gallium3D drivers???

[With there perhaps a LLVM based optimizing compiler to compile Gallium3D IR into efficient hardware commands at the lowest layers]

[my apologies for the double post / I posted an expanded question on the previous article... http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...25#post138646]

Just to close off this question, there is a common GLSL compiler generating an intermediate representation (Mesa IR / TGSI), then the custom compiler turns that intermediate representation into hardware-specific instructions.

[Ex-Cyber]

Just to close off this question, there is a common GLSL compiler generating an intermediate representation (Mesa IR / TGSI), then the custom compiler turns that intermediate representation into hardware-specific instructions.

So is that IR what actually crosses the state tracker <-> GPU driver interface?

[bridgman]

Yep, basically IR for the shader programs, some "when you draw, draw this way" calls, and some "draw these triangles" calls. There's more, but those are the important ones.

Strictly speaking a state tracker implies Gallium3D so it would be TGSI rather than Mesa IR crossing the interface, but TGSI is just another form of IR.

[V!NCENT]

What is IR?

[chrisrock]

What is IR?

"Intermediate representation (IR)"

http://www.mesa3d.org/shading.html

[xception]

IR = Intermediate Representation