RADV Vulkan vs. RadeonSI OpenGL Performance With Linux 4.13 + Mesa 17.3-dev

[pal666]

Well and Dota 2 for 2 out of 3 cards at the more popular lower resolution.

no, "sometimes faster" doesn't count

[pal666]

I thought the idea with Windows drivers was you implement WDDM driver interface and get DirectX for free

still not supported by mesa

[airlied]

For mesa on windows you could pretty easily do a windows OpenGL ICD using mesa and some winsys code to speak to windows drivers, this would be very different than doing dx10/11/12 drivers using mesa codebase, but you could easily do one without the other. You could also do windows Vulkan drivers using radv as a basis.

[airlied]

pal666 so OpenGL is only sometimes faster as well?

[microcode]

ok, in fantasy world mesa can be used on windows. in real world it can't

Why do you find it necessary to pick things apart, but then have nothing to back it up except you just felt like picking something apart.

Performance parity for OpenGL was a fantasy at one point, so was feature parity, so was having any acceleration at all, so was Linux being viable at all, the moon landing, every silicon manufacturing process, the Magna Carta, the Mona Lisa. The reason we ever have nice things is because somebody sits down and turns these little fantasies into reality. There is literally no technical or legal reason why (accelerated) Mesa would be inappropriate on Windows, Mesa already runs on windows (it also ran [runs?] on DOS when DOS was a thing) if we're talking about the CPU side of things.

TL;DR: go find another parade to rain on.

[Kendji]

I really hope they will get the vulkan driver up-to-snuff, since from my understanding, more of future software will be using it

[DrYak]

ok, in fantasy world mesa can be used on windows. in real world it can't

To elaborate further on what microcode said :

- Back in the days of 3DFx's Voodo card, Mesa was a viable implementation of GL API on Voodoo (mostly using Glide as a back end). in fact it was one of the first major hardware accelerated versions of Mesa.

- Mesa on windows was a way to get more GL API support than what was supported in the miniGL driver that where custom tailored to game engine needs. (basically - in a bit of over simplification - miniGL was the strict minimal subset of OpenGL that you need to get Quake 1 running. If you need something else, you could wait for 3DFx to implement the missing parts when extending the miniGL for a new game engine, or you could play around with Mesa)

- Mesa became critical once 3DFx went belly up and got bought by Nvidia and all development around Voodoo stopped definitely (except for the bits that ended-up showing inside Nvidia's GeForce FX). There would be no further development of the OpenGL driver. So any development was done by the community using Mesa. This went all the way to the point that enough of openGL was supported to get Doom 3 running (with a shitty visual quality due to Voodoo hardware lacking lots of functionality - like more multi-texturing and bump-maping - but still).

- Other crazy guys used the Allegro library (kind of like SDL, except that is also works on MS-DOS using DJGPP port of GCC), together with the Glide DOS driver (an OVL dynamic dos library, used by some 3D accelerated ports of DOS games) and ported Mesa on this. Making 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics in dos games.