R600g SB Now Supports Geometry Shaders

[phoronix]

Phoronix: R600g SB Now Supports Geometry Shaders

For those running older Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D graphics driver, an important update landed in Mesa 10.6-devel Git this past week...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=R600g-SB-Geometry-Shaders

[Dukenukemx]

That's good to hear. Not that I have a R600 card lying around. Got plenty of R300's though.

[Kemosabe]

I don't get it.
Geometry shaders are an OpenGL 3.2 core feature which is supported for well ... quite a while by all the drivers.
Or does the article want to tell me the geometry shaders are now optimized?

[SXX⁣]

Or does the article want to tell me the geometry shaders are now optimized?

Correct.

[Azrael5]

thanks very much.

[leonmaxx]

Any chance that register spilling will be implemented in R600g ?

[smitty3268]

I don't get it.
Geometry shaders are an OpenGL 3.2 core feature which is supported for well ... quite a while by all the drivers.
Or does the article want to tell me the geometry shaders are now optimized?

Yes, SB is the optimizing compiler in the driver. I doubt it makes much of a difference - not many apps use complicated geometry shaders, but it's good to have it done regardless.

Also note that it's only turned on for Evergreen+ hardware. For r600/r700, there are still regressions and so it still defaults off.

[SXX⁣]

Also note that it's only turned on for Evergreen+ hardware. For r600/r700, there are still regressions and so it still defaults off.

As far as I remember SB is on by default for fragment/vertex shaders.
Or do you mean it's disabled by default for geometry shaders?

[smitty3268]

As far as I remember SB is on by default for fragment/vertex shaders.
Or do you mean it's disabled by default for geometry shaders?

I was speaking of the geometry shader support. Michael's story says it was turned on, but that's only true for the more recent hardware generations.

[SXX⁣]

I was speaking of the geometry shader support. Michael's story says it was turned on, but that's only true for the more recent hardware generations.

Thanks for details, it's much more clear now.