Nouveau Picks Up Slightly Better OpenGL 4.0 Support

[imirkin]

Unfortunately I don't think there's any demand for tessellation shaders / subroutines atm., so I think nobody will work on these massive features any time soon. Which is unfortunate, because I'd totally like to try out shader subroutines. =/ I wonder if they can be implemented on GL3 hardware..

Actually the nvc0 driver already has a bunch of the necessary support for tessellation (and there's no way it'll happen on nv50 -- while it could be emulated, it would be very slow, thus useless). But there is a lot of infrastructure missing (glsl, mesa core, gallium), and it'll require someone who knows what they're doing to implement it (i.e. not me). My hope is that the Intel guys will be doing the glsl/core bits soon. I _think_ shader subroutines should be possible on nv50; they're definitely going to be possible on nvc0. But again, the biggest challenge is actually the plumbing. By the time that's done, the work left for the driver is actually relatively small.

[Ancurio]

Unfortunately I don't think there's any demand for tessellation shaders / subroutines atm., so I think nobody will work on these massive features any time soon. Which is unfortunate, because I'd totally like to try out shader subroutines. =/ I wonder if they can be implemented on GL3 hardware..

[imirkin]

The gain is that he then decides to go work where he's welcome on the radeon team and helps out that driver instead.

The theory being that I care about destructive criticism from people who don't contribute to nouveau? Interesting. I don't And I feel very welcome on the nouveau project, and would highly recommend it as an interesting place to start to anyone looking to try GPU dev.

[smitty3268]

Well, it's not, not at all. imirkin can and enjoys working on opengl, if you told him to stop working on that to concentrate on reclocking or whatever else he may decide to stop contributing to nouveau alltogether, because since you're not paid you must at least enjoy what you're doing. Now where's the gain?

The gain is that he then decides to go work where he's welcome on the radeon team and helps out that driver instead.

[DanL]

^Yes, I understand that. I guess this is just one of those things that I do not find newsworthy, but other people do.

[giucam]

It seems odd to talk about OpenGL 4.x for nouveau when reclocking isn't working yet for the (Kepler/Fermi/Maxwell) cards that support OpenGL 4.x
Cart before horse?

Besides what imirkin said there is another point. Many people seems to think about a open source voluntary-based project as a software house product, where you can decide to move the human resources based on some priorities. Well, it's not, not at all. imirkin can and enjoys working on opengl, if you told him to stop working on that to concentrate on reclocking or whatever else he may decide to stop contributing to nouveau alltogether, because since you're not paid you must at least enjoy what you're doing. Now where's the gain?

[DanL]

Reclocking is hard to work on, and requires tons of hardware and time for tracing, testing, etc. This is not available to everyone. But it's being worked on, although progress is slow. Why not improve the OpenGL driver in the meanwhile?

Fair enough. Thanks.

[uid313]

Obligatory reference link

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/docs/GL3.txt

[imirkin]

Well, then you are exactly not targeting user count for now.

Not sure when a claim was made that I was. I'm targeting learning about GPU's and 3D graphics, and improving driver quality. (And no, "reclocking" doesn't fit under quality.)

I imagine the only ways to help are to distort the situation when talking about its performance to make more people use Nouveau (loss of honesty), or reporting bugs (loss of performance since you don't use the NVIDIA driver).

I don't think anyone condones lying about the state of the driver. If you feel like there's online docs that do so, let me know, I'll try to correct them. If you choose to use the blob driver, so be it; doesn't make much of a difference to me personally. It's definitely the way to go if you're looking to maximize performance, esp on Fermi+. Not sure what point you're trying to make.

[Calinou]

Reclocking is hard to work on, and requires tons of hardware and time for tracing, testing, etc. This is not available to everyone. But it's being worked on, although progress is slow. Why not improve the OpenGL driver in the meanwhile?

Well, then you are exactly not targeting user count for now.

<insert "Supported Features" XKCD here>

I would rather get involved, but that implies using Nouveaau if you're not a C programmer, I imagine the only ways to help are to distort the situation when talking about its performance to make more people use Nouveau (loss of honesty), or reporting bugs (loss of performance since you don't use the NVIDIA driver).