Freedreno 3D Driver Hits Rendering Milestone

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 26 June 2012 at 07:47 AM EDT. 5 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
While not as far along as the ARM Lima driver or even OpenFIMG, the open-source reverse-engineered "Freedreno" driver for Qualcomm's Snapdragon graphics hardware has hit a rendering milestone. There's also a small ARM Mali driver update.

Rob Clark, the Texas Instruments developer who is working on this new driver in his spare time after an interesting launch, is back to making some interesting progress.

Rob has the first successful renders on Freedreno in conjunction with his FDRE library. This isn't a glxgears (well, eglgears) milestone or anything too exciting in the 3D space, but he's basically to rendering a quad-flat, triangle-quad, and a triangle-smoothed. This is similar to where the reverse-engineered ARM Mali driver was back in February in Brussels.


What the Freedreno driver can now render... Not quite Counter-Strike: Source, yet.

Rob wrote about the "first renders" milestone on his blog. The Freedreno code is housed on Gitorious.org.


Luc Verhaegen showing off Lima driver progress last month over beers in Franconia.

Over in Codethink's Lima driver camp for open-source ARM Mali enablement, there's a small update too. The developers have been able to get a test application running that's only executing code that was assembled by them, i.e. not using ARM's commercial shader compiler or other non-open tools. However, the Lima driver still doesn't have its own shader compiler for this young open-source ARM graphics driver.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week