Originally posted by Dukenukemx
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- OSes that don't implement the full Gallium3d stack won't be able to take advantage of the state tracker(s). So basically that means only Linux.
- Hardware that doesn't use Gallium3d won't be able to take advantage of the state tracker(s). That means not only the proprietary drivers, but also one of the very major open source drivers: the officially-supported Intel "classic mesa" driver, which is supporting pretty good OpenGL 3.0 on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. This also excludes hardware for which proprietary driver support exists, but no open source support exists (e.g. Radeon HD7000, Nvidia "Kepler", both of which are probably many months away from being usable on Gallium3d.)
- Wine is the platform that could make particularly good use of these state trackers. Basically if you aren't trying to run pre-existing Windows software with these state trackers, you are wasting your time; as far as native programs are concerned, they all use OpenGL or GLES, not Direct3d. Even if suddenly we had a lot of worthwhile native programs written to the Direct3d API as exposed by Gallium3d, we'd still have the major issue that there is a severe lack of support for this state tracker compared to the level of effort that goes into the OpenGL / GLX state trackers. So you are very likely to experience missing features and bugs when running these state trackers -- moreso than if you use OpenGL.
- Because Wine is designed to run on non-Linux platforms (BSD, Mac OS X), and with non-Gallium3d drivers, the Wine developers consider the first two points above to be extremely major disadvantages.
- Wine already has a FANTASTIC translation layer between Direct3d (8 and 9 at least, with major progress being made on 10) and OpenGL. The accomplishments they've made in terms of performance, CPU usage reduction and driver compatibility over the past few years... it's astonishing. You can play high-end games like Skyrim and Star Trek Online under wine using a Gallium3d driver. If you told me this 3 years ago, I'd have laughed you to the other side of the world. Wine is NOT "done" its job yet, but it has come an incredibly long way in its journey to becoming a fully compatible Windows program emulator while offering near-native performance. I think we should let them keep going down that path without trying to change to an unproven technology.
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