How Far The Radeon Gallium3D Driver Has Come In Five Years

[villeneuve]

Best moment for me was when I completely reinstalled Kubuntu on my AMD E-450 powered netbook and decided to really try out the free drivers first before installing Catalyst. And it ran great, felt the as snappy as with Catalyst. A short Wiki-read let me find out that VDPAU was supported and I was blown away by that, because I could now run XBMC on the netbook. Compared to an Nvidia -card running with VDPAU the E-450 is only lacking in deinterlacing- and scaling-quality, otherwise it's perfect.
Great work by all the developers involved!

On my desktop PC I still can't use Linux with all my displays, because I have an onboard HD 4250 plus a dedicated HD 3850 running in ATI's Surround View mode to be able to run 4 displays. Surround View sadly doesn't work on Linux, so it's either HD 4250 or HD 3850 and two displays only, which is why I still use Windows 7 on that machine mainly.

[geearf]

Certainly building mesa with bleeding edge llvm seems like it would be dangerous

That's what Arch users of the mesa-git repo get everyday

[bridgman]

With nouveau, when I fix bugs in the shader compiler, I just fix them and... they're fixed. With LLVM you fix them, but then you have to wait for an LLVM release, and worry about different mesa/llvm version combinations, etc. Having it be self-contained definitely makes things simpler in that respect.

Yeah, this is the old "should we keep a suitably updated copy of llvm in the mesa tree, or at least have the mesa build pick up an appropriately new commit from the llvm development tree ?" question. I keep feeling that the answer should be "yes", although in fairness I also remember that there were good reasons not to do this the last time it was discussed.

Certainly building mesa with bleeding edge llvm seems like it would be dangerous, but building it with a specific commit updated every month or so might work well.

[DarkFoss]

A big Thank You to all you devs for all your hard work. Me and my 2 Fury X's eagerly await the unveiling of the AMDGPU driver. Bought 2 as an extra Thank you to AMD.

[moilami]

Hi. I am very grateful of this Radeon Open Source graphics driver with my 7970 DirectCU II TOP card. I can play Empire: Total War and enable maximum graphical settings. If and when Napoleon: Total War is released I will buy AMD R9 Fury X, if that is needed in order to play the game with full settings.

As for now, fuck you Nvidia

[dungeon]

Yeah you have one/two things more to arrange and to care about when it is separate, but nothing much more then for other mesa dependencies.

[imirkin]

When it comes to OpenGL and radeonsi, think of llvm as shader compiler... so no - it is not restriction to development, even if shader compiler is in mesa it would need fixes for this - either way it is not a time to push that extension before fixing shader compiler.

With nouveau, when I fix bugs in the shader compiler, I just fix them and... they're fixed. With LLVM you fix them, but then you have to wait for an LLVM release, and worry about different mesa/llvm version combinations, etc. Having it be self-contained definitely makes things simpler in that respect.

[whitecat]

Thanks to all the devs for all the work!
I just hope r600g will have some GL4 love too :-)

[dungeon]

It's too bad that radeonsi depends on LLVM, feels like another restriction to development...

When it comes to OpenGL and radeonsi, think of llvm as shader compiler... so no - it is not restriction to development, even if shader compiler is in mesa it would need fixes for this - either way it is not a time to push that extension before fixing shader compiler.

Hopefully this new Victor Vran ARPG will work, as it require right OpenGL 4.1

[asdfblah]

Sometimes they push it earlier, sometimes not... sometimes they wait for kernel to got something, sometimes they wait for llvm to got something, etc...

For example as Dave said GL_ARB_gpu_shader5 mesa radeosi part is basically there, but it waits for llvm fixes, etc... meaning he can probably pushed it right now to advertise 4.1, but that does not make sense as he knows it would be broken.

Ah, I see, thanks for explaining... It's too bad that radeonsi depends on LLVM, feels like another restriction to development... OTOH, it's great when it works, I suppose.