ATI 2900 and the tessellator unit?

I’m not completely sure you can apply that saying to an API :wink:

Originally posted by V-man:

Has Intel released GL 2.0 drivers for their chipsets? Do they support FBO and all the newer extensions?

Not yet, but with Mesa 7.0 supporting OpenGL 2.1 a major step toward it has been done. AFAIK the i965 driver will soon do hardware-accelerated GLSL shaders and is intended to support full OpenGL 2.1.

Philipp

wow, i must get me an intel.

What does Mesa have to do with Intel?? Maybe the execution speed is the same, but apart from that?

Mesa is a framework for an OpenGL implementation. The software renderer is just one part of Mesa as are the free DRI drivers.
Mesa and it’s software renderer have to support a feature before it can be implemented in a driver (unless you want to write driver-specific software fallbacks).
Sine Intel is the last major graphics vendor to give specifications to developers their graphics engines are well supported: Many features supported, stable drivers (compared to ATI or Nvidia where everything has to be reverse-enginered to write free drivers).

[Of course nothing of this applies to Windows drivers]

Originally posted by Mars_9999:
Has anyone here gotten the 2900 card and tried out the new tessellator unit with OpenGL? Does ATI even have support for this yet?
It’s not supported yet in either OpenGL or D3D.

Originally posted by kon:
There’s an example in the new sdk.
http://ati.amd.com/developer/SDK/Samples_Documents.html

We don’t have anything in our SDK using the tessellator yet. However, this is something we’ll definitely look into adding a sample for once there is proper driver support in place.

Originally posted by Zengar:
ATI still has no advanced opengl support for latest cards (they didn’t even bother to implement the FBO multisample/blit extensions), and there is no evidence that they will in nearest future. I tried asking Humus on the b3d forums if some support is planned, but he seems to have just ignored the question.
I don’t think I’ve seen that question. I’ve been away for more than a month in a business trip + vacation. During that time I think I check B3D only once.

Let me also take this opportunity to clarify what my job is. I’m not part of the OpenGL driver team, nor am I an official spokesperson of AMD. It’s not my job to answer OpenGL or AMD questions on public forums. If I don’t answer a question, it might be because I don’t know the answer. I certainly don’t know everything about our OpenGL driver or what the GL driver plans are. My job title is “ISV Engineer”. This means I’m a contact person for tier-1 developers. If you’re a developer from Id, Raven, Epic etc., then you come to me. If not, developer relations will take care of you. I do have plenty of contact with devrel people, and they sit in the cubes next to mine, and I take care of some stuff that’s sent to them that they pass along to me. However, it’s not my job to take care of hobby coders. It’s not my job to read this or other forums. It’s something I normally do on my spare time. Sometimes if I have time available at work I look into a bug someone has reported here and pass along to the driver team, but if I’m dealing with a tier-1 developer at the moment, I’m not going to spend any significant amount of time looking into problems reported here. Replying to messages here is almost exclusively done on my spare time. Only in rare cases do I post from work.

Originally posted by Mars_9999:
Well if ATI does drop GL support than I guess they just made my decision for me on what I want to program on. Nvidia all the way.
AMD is not dropping GL support.

Originally posted by Jan:
As mentioned by some ATI folks, they have a completely rewritten driver that is supposed to be released “soon”. I would think that they don’t care to implement stuff in their “old” (current) driver, and instead will finish their new one.
It’s released already on Vista and on XP as well for the HD 2000 series. The legacy driver is not being worked on except for critical bug fixes.

Oh, really. I expected more PR when the switch was made. Well, it is a good thing it is done already.

Jan.

Originally posted by PkK:
[b] Mesa is a framework for an OpenGL implementation. The software renderer is just one part of Mesa as are the free DRI drivers.
Mesa and it’s software renderer have to support a feature before it can be implemented in a driver (unless you want to write driver-specific software fallbacks).
Sine Intel is the last major graphics vendor to give specifications to developers their graphics engines are well supported: Many features supported, stable drivers (compared to ATI or Nvidia where everything has to be reverse-enginered to write free drivers).

[Of course nothing of this applies to Windows drivers] [/b]
So we are talking about Linux.
I’m not sure I understand what you are saying. Are you saying Mesa is the solution to have uniform and stable GL support on Linux?
Also, are you saying it is better to have an Intel graphics instead of nVidia or ATI?

On Apple, I know that Apple considers GL as a first class citizen.

On Windows… IMO, there is no simple solution. You take it as is or leave it :slight_smile:

@Humus: I know, and I am not accussing you of anything. Sorry if my words appeared to be offensive.

No offense taken. :slight_smile:
Just wanted to clarify since much of this thread seemed to about me for some reason.

Originally posted by Jan:
[b] Oh, really. I expected more PR when the switch was made. Well, it is a good thing it is done already.

Jan. [/b]
While it’s ‘done’ the current state of the x64 driver, while improved, is missing at least one extension in the XP x64 driver and has just stopped me working on something (the PBO extension) :frowning:

(my thoughts were basically ‘hmmm, it could be cool if I could do this, could process it on the gpu then copy to… vertex… mem… oh ffs, no PBO extension any more…’)

So we are talking about Linux.

Linux and FreeBSD. You didn’t specify an OS in your original question.

I’m not sure I understand what you are saying. Are you saying Mesa is the solution to have uniform and stable GL support on Linux?

On Linux most OpenGL drivers are based on Mesa. Therefore OpenGL 2.1 support in Mesa is an important step towards OpenGL 2.1 support in the drivers including the i965 driver, the driver that supports Intel’s latest graphics solution.

Also, are you saying it is better to have an Intel graphics instead of nVidia or ATI?

Intel cards have good driver support on Linux. IMO that makes them the best low-end graphics solution. Of course they’re behind ATI’s and Nvidia’s high-end cards performance-wise.