Valve Optimizations, D3D9 & GL4 Topped Mesa This Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Optimizations, D3D9 & GL4 Topped Mesa This Year

Mesa made a heck of a lot of progress this year for advancing the state of open-source Linux graphics drivers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg3MzQ

[Ashton]

in part thanks to Valve continuing to contract LunarG to work on the Linux graphics stack.

wrong. "git shortlog -i --author lunarg --since 2014-01-01" shows only 26 patches from lunarg. 14 of those look like a GL 4.1 feature (viewport arrays), and 11 more are clearly bug fixes. only 1 patch claims to fix performance, and it's implementing some blit path that only helps intel users, and doesn't even mention games.

so great, valve pays lunarg, and they just fix bugs? i mean, seriously, even totally part time mesa contributors have that many patches. the top contributors have like 30x that many patches.

it sure seems like these guys are just great at taking credit for other people's work.

[CalcProgrammer1]

2014 has been an amazing year for Linux and open source graphics!

I've been very happy with my Radeon cards this year. With 2013's big changes (Radeon video decode, DPM) already in place, 2014 managed to boost performance even more, improve radeonsi significantly, and add new features. Gallium Nine is amazing and I'm really glad it took off the way it did. I've been using it to play Skyrim and a few other games on Wine and it runs circles around even CSMT patched Wine. Cutting the interpreter out makes a significant difference. DRI3 improvements have made it to PPA thanks to Sarnex and I'm really enjoying DRI3's PRIME implementation as it means seamless gaming on my laptop's discrete 7730M GPU. I even use PRIME on my TV PC where I have the TV connected to the onboard APU VGA and render games on a Radeon 5870 x6 edition.

Then, in the mobile space, we saw Freedreno keep improving as well as the new VC4 driver for VideoCore IV. I got to play around with Freedreno finally and it is amazing to actually get a full accelerated desktop on ARM. I haven't been able to compile VC4 yet but I can't wait for see proper Gallium3D-based acceleration on the RPi. It will make that platform much better as a mini-desktop.

I can't wait to see where we are a year from now!