Re: State of Linux graphics

From: Jim Gettys (jg_at_freedesktop.org)
Date: 08/31/05

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    To: Discuss issues related to the xorg tree <xorg@lists.freedesktop.org>
Date:	Wed, 31 Aug 2005 13:48:11 -0400

    Certainly replicating OpenGL 2.0's programmability through Render makes
    no sense at all to me (or most others, I believe/hope). If you want to
    use full use of the GPU, I'm happy to say you should be using OpenGL.
                                    - Jim

    On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 23:33 -0700, Allen Akin wrote:
    > On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 01:26:53PM -0400, David Reveman wrote:
    > | On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 12:03 -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:
    > | > In general, the whole concept of programmable graphics hardware is
    > | > not addressed in APIs like xlib and Cairo. This is a very important
    > | > point. A major new GPU feature, programmability is simply not
    > | > accessible from the current X APIs. OpenGL exposes this
    > | > programmability via its shader language.
    > |
    > | ... I don't
    > | see why this can't be exposed through the Render extension. ...
    >
    > What has always concerned me about this approach is that when you add
    > enough functionality to Render or some new X extensions to fully exploit
    > previous (much less current and in-development!) generations of GPUs,
    > you've essentially duplicated OpenGL 2.0. You need to identify the
    > resources to be managed (framebuffer objects, vertex objects, textures,
    > programs of several kinds, etc.); explain how they're specified and how
    > they interact and how they're owned/shared; define a vocabulary of
    > commands that operate upon them; think about how those commands are
    > translated and executed on various pieces of hardware; examine the
    > impact of things like graphics context switching on the system
    > architecture; and deal with a dozen other matters that have already been
    > addressed fully or partly in the OpenGL world.
    >
    > I think it makes a lot of sense to leverage the work that's already been
    > done: Take OpenGL as a given, and add extensions for what's missing.
    > Don't create a parallel API that in the long run must develop into
    > something at least as rich as OpenGL was to start with. That costs time
    > and effort, and likely won't be supported by the hardware vendors to the
    > same extent that OpenGL is (thanks to the commercial forces already at
    > work). Let OpenGL do 80% of the job, then work to provide the last 20%,
    > rather than trying to do 100% from scratch.
    >
    > Allen
    > _______________________________________________
    > xorg mailing list
    > xorg@lists.freedesktop.org
    > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg

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