Zengar: do you have a pointer to something that says this feature (i.e. glRender(GL_SELECT) ) is deprecated?
It would surprise me if it is. See, this is meant to be the beauty of open standards – features do not just “get deprecated” because a vendor decides to stop implementing it. Being able to rely on a standard is a programmers’ necessity so that they can use standard features without having to worry about them being deprecated in the future without a very good reason.
Transforming on the CPU is obviously insufficient if, indeed, this is what ATI’s drivers have been doing. My tests have shown a sequence of operations taking 5 seconds with the new drivers, where before it would take 50ms. Slowing things down 100-fold is obviously not an option.
My current hope is that this is just a bug that ATI have introduced into their drivers just after (internal) version 8.401. It sucks that this also happens to be the last version before HD support came in. Looks like I might be stocking up on X1950s…
And this does, indeed, appear to be what is happening. Upgrading catalyst drivers on Windows and Linux on any number of cards (I’ve tested X1950, X600, 9600 and X850XT) utterly breaks glRender(GL_SELECT). I’m trying to track this down – see
http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~tapted/slow_glselect.html
There is a cross-platform test program there. You can cross-compile it, or I’ll probably put up a Windows binary for the lazy.
For now, I’m informing clients not to upgrade their graphics drivers, or to get an old version from
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/radeonxprevious-xp.html
I’m still testing Windows. Certainly, the latest catalyst driver (8.2) has the problem. In Linux, ati-drivers-8.40.4 is the last version that has a working GL_SELECT. If versions match up this might correspond to Catalyst 7.8 being the last working version for Windows.
I’ve started the tedious process of reporting it to ATI using their support pages. I’ve had two “responses” – boilerplate that shows they obviously haven’t actually read the ticket description. Frustrating.
If it doesn’t get fixed, I’ll certainly have to avoid ATI cards like the plague in any future development I do. And… if my research goes to market, it would definitely not be using ATI cards.