Mesa 4.0, help needed
Hi,
Mesa 4.0 is out, but the GGI port is incomplete. This version not only
adds support for more extensions and OpenGL 1.3, but also fixes a large
number of bugs with respect to 3.4, as well as optimizations for more
architectures (e.g., 3dnow and Sparc).
With 3.5 I was going to ditch the GGI package, in the hope that
interested people would complete the port, but because of problems with
the 3dfx driver, I didn't upload a package for this version. Now the
3dfx driver is working again. It's not that difficult, it only takes
time and some understanding of the GGI API (documentation pointers will
be welcomed) as well as the Mesa internal working (and in this
particular case, it's just understanding how two header files "work").
You have the X driver as an example. What you have to do is, say,
figure out how to tell GGI to render a line between column A and B for
a given scanline. You might want to go a step further and optimize the
whole thing, perhaps GGI can do the color interpolation itself, I don't
know. The whole thing probably takes a couple of days, which I don't
have right now.
Any takers?
PS: Why is Mesa interesting? Afterall, the hardware accelerated
version in XFree86 4.0 is much better, isn't it? Well, for starters,
no, it's not. It's faster. It can do (bi|tri)?linear interpolation
faster, probably (this isn't true for every card out there). Putting
that aside, because of restrictions in the GLX implementation (or
specification, depending on your POV), the number of visuals you have
when there's no hardware acceleration (i.e., when your card is not
supported by DRI) is rather low. It's not only the number of visuals,
but also the depth of the buffers. In this sense, an implementation
that's not constrained by the X server is interesting because it can
offer much deeper buffers for you to play with. It also offers
features not available to your hardware, this means you can at least
test your algorithms under different conditions. And if none of that
is interesting for you, you get a driver for pretty old 3dfx cards.
--
Marcelo | The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like
mmagallo@debian.org | a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
| -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
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