OpenGL Arrays of Arrays Code Finally Landing In Mesa

[smitty3268]

Out of curiosity, what currently uses this? I'm not bashing anything here I'm legitimately wondering. I find it a little weird people would fund this specific feature.

It was funded because Timothy came here to the Phoronix forums and asked people to fund him. I don't think anyone was specifically seeking to fund this particular feature.

As for why he picked it, I think SXX hit the nail on the head - it was just one of the features that none of the regular Mesa devs had gotten around to starting when he was looking for something to work on and it doesn't really require any specific hardware knowledge, just changes to the higher level GL code.

[smitty3268]

So what exactly is still needed to make the AoA code work with different GPUs? Does the preliminary Mesa support mean that there's some API stuff and generic infrastructure in place? Even the softpipe/llvmpipe approach still requires extra code? What about intel/nvidia/amd drivers?

I believe it's basically done for everyone.

Other drivers just need to test thoroughly (hopefully he added a bunch of piglet tests) and fix all the bugs they find.

AoA is one of those things that touches so many different parts of the driver that it's likely that there will be a few bugs to fix where the driver is assuming that all arrays are only 1D - he had to fix several of these in the i965 code - but for the most part they should be pretty trivial.

[swoorup]

So, this sounds rather a driver level feature. All of this I imagine are just blasted away with vulkan.

[mcallegari]

Just my 2 cents out of my overall ignorance...

It seems to me that the goal here is to complete the OGL ES 3.1 support. In fact AFAIK Timothy is now working on the last piece of it, which is GL_ARB_compute_shader.

Thing is that it seems Intel/Mesa guys are more interested in the i965 ES support rather than the desktop one, and the i965 driver is in fact still stuck on OGL 3.3.
Is there anyone knowing the reasons for this ?
Why nobody(?) is working on the fp64 and tessellation support for the i965 driver ? Completing those will jump i965 straight to OGL 4.2 and it is sad to see this is not a priority.

[Sceptic]

Just my 2 cents out of my overall ignorance...

It seems to me that the goal here is to complete the OGL ES 3.1 support. In fact AFAIK Timothy is now working on the last piece of it, which is GL_ARB_compute_shader.

Thing is that it seems Intel/Mesa guys are more interested in the i965 ES support rather than the desktop one, and the i965 driver is in fact still stuck on OGL 3.3.
Is there anyone knowing the reasons for this ?
Why nobody(?) is working on the fp64 and tessellation support for the i965 driver ? Completing those will jump i965 straight to OGL 4.2 and it is sad to see this is not a priority.

As the article says, Timothy has started to work on GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts; Jordan Justen is working on GL_ARB_compute_shader.

Sceptic

[smitty3268]

Is there anyone knowing the reasons for this ?
Why nobody(?) is working on the fp64 and tessellation support for the i965 driver ? Completing those will jump i965 straight to OGL 4.2 and it is sad to see this is not a priority.

They do have branches with that work partially done. Clearly they are prioritizing GLES work, though.

Probably because their hardware isn't fast enough to run GL4 games at playable speeds anyway.

[caligula]

Just my 2 cents out of my overall ignorance...

It seems to me that the goal here is to complete the OGL ES 3.1 support. In fact AFAIK Timothy is now working on the last piece of it, which is GL_ARB_compute_shader.

Thing is that it seems Intel/Mesa guys are more interested in the i965 ES support rather than the desktop one, and the i965 driver is in fact still stuck on OGL 3.3.
Is there anyone knowing the reasons for this ?
Why nobody(?) is working on the fp64 and tessellation support for the i965 driver ? Completing those will jump i965 straight to OGL 4.2 and it is sad to see this is not a priority.

There is more moneys in embedded OpenGL ES than desktop atm.