A New Acceleration Architecture For X

[colo]

I'm getting sick of all this, really. It's been less than a week that I caught myself thinking, "Hey, maybe with the next Ubuntu release, it's time to ged rid of manually enforcing XAA in xorg.conf, and move over towards EXA, which has been on everyone's roadmap for ages! YAY!", and now THIS?

I sure do hope implementing whatever FSCKING new-on-the-block acceleration architecture of the day does not take as long as we've seen it take with EXA. Because if it does, I might as well go back to fbterm with GNU screen, and get rid of all this annoying X11 shite for the next few years...

[Regenwald]

@leef
god damn good commentary. you got the point^^

[Melcar]

Yeah, basically

People complain about ATI's drivers a lot, but they're the only ones that actually follow standards. Intel rewrites them constantly, and Nvidia ignores them completely. I wish the devs could finally make some decisions and implement stuff.

The problem then seems that the standards don't always seem to work, that's why Intel keeps re-writing them and nvidia keeps ignoring them .

[TechMage89]

Yeah, basically

People complain about ATI's drivers a lot, but they're the only ones that actually follow standards. Intel rewrites them constantly, and Nvidia ignores them completely. I wish the devs could finally make some decisions and implement stuff.

[leef]

So to recap,

NVidia bypasses X, Intel rewrites X, and AMD has good hardware.

[Gentooer]

EXA ist just an API an can be implemented using the 3D engine. And the recent chnages that speeded up EXA were not in the intel driver, but in the xserver - thats why radeon flys now with EXA too.

EXA also works great on my 6800gt with nouveau. Compositing is so much faster than with the blob!

[bridgman]

Exactly. I bet Keith is already regretting giving it a name

[TechMage89]

Keith's blogs are always a bit over my head, but I gather that the purpose of UXA is to solve some of the interface issues between the 2d and 3d ends of the driver to help GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap work better and enable GEM to handle allocation for 2d.

In that case, it's not really a new acceleration architecture at all, but just a refactoring of some of the backend assumptions in EXA? Is that about right?

[madman2k]

-Exa has been around for ages and only recently intel got it performing well.

EXA ist just an API an can be implemented using the 3D engine. And the recent chnages that speeded up EXA were not in the intel driver, but in the xserver - thats why radeon flys now with EXA too.

So can we stop whining now and accept that building a proper acceleration architecture takes time...

[_txf_]

I keep wondering when we'll move to a unified 2d/3d stack, in other words, when 2d API is just a subset of the 3d API.

I wonder if this is already the case with nvidia...There is a known problem with 2d on 8/9 series cards and the fact that these have far less dedicated 2d hardware causes the slowness which is less drastic under previous generations. The problem could be due to poor mapping of 2d calls to the gpu itself...

Unfortunately nvidia is not an open driver and we will never know for sure. What gets to me is just that all these acceleration architectures are a series of false starts which end up (sort of) deprecated before they go anywhere.

-Exa has been around for ages and only recently intel got it performing well.
-Where is glucose? or xorg 7.4 for that matter? .
-Is gallium going to survive long enough to reach critical mass? or are they just going to junk it just as drivers start to use it?