OpenGL 2 support on Catalyst hotfix.

Thanks for the help, Octsol. GLee 2.1 now supports the OGLSL extensions. I haven’t had time to test it fully yet, but it compiles okay, and the extensions are detected.

If anyone is interested, you can get it here:
http://elf-stone.com/downloads.php

[This message has been edited by bunny (edited 11-21-2003).]

You might want to change the typedef for defining GLhandleARB. I just looked at the glext.h in 3dLabs’ example and they define it as a signed integer (int).

Done

I found a problem with these drivers. Milkshape 1.7 keeps crashing upon startup. I reinstalled ATI’s 3.9 drivers that are on their website and Milkshape stopped crashing, which sucks cause these don’t support GLSLANG.

I’m not sure that the GLSL support is ready for release just because it’s in the HOTFIX.

My belief is that hotfixes are made available by ATI engineering for specific bugs, and don’t go through the same QA cycle as a “real” release. It could be the case that engineering builds of the drivers have the GLSL support enabled, but release builds have it disabled. I can see how hotfix drivers would then be built in non-release fashion, and thus include stuff that won’t be in the next real, qualified release.

Also, this probably makes it a better idea to run release drivers, unless you experience the specific problem that the hotfix applies to. QA is a good thing.

yeah, thats my guess, too… but who cares? even while buggy, it is rather mature after those months of development. mature enough for US to work with.

Originally posted by jwatte:
[b]I’m not sure that the GLSL support is ready for release just because it’s in the HOTFIX.

My belief is that hotfixes are made available by ATI engineering for specific bugs, and don’t go through the same QA cycle as a “real” release. It could be the case that engineering builds of the drivers have the GLSL support enabled, but release builds have it disabled. I can see how hotfix drivers would then be built in non-release fashion, and thus include stuff that won’t be in the next real, qualified release.

Also, this probably makes it a better idea to run release drivers, unless you experience the specific problem that the hotfix applies to. QA is a good thing.[/b]

Who cares whether hotfix or not ? We are waiting for GLSL for a very long time and we want something to play around and it does not need to be the final release.
Are you somehow releated to NV ?

cu
Tom

The only problem I’m having is that two of the example shaders don’t work on my radeon 9700 pro. The mandelbrot shader gives this error: “Internal compiler error:loop constructs not yet implemented.”. The texture shader gives various warnings, and refuses to be run due to a lack of available constants.

So presumably if the loop construct hasn’t been added yet, that would imply that the compiler isn’t quite complete. Does anyone know if the loop construct will be supported later on my chipset, or if it’s not there because of a hardware limitation?

Look at it this way, the support for the extensions was in previous driver builds but had to be enabled. Its in this build but doesnt have to be enabled, its just there.

Originally posted by bunny:
Does anyone know if the loop construct will be supported later on my chipset, or if it’s not there because of a hardware limitation?

Can’t say for certain, but I think it’s safe to assume that at some point in the future constant loops will be supported in hardware by unrolling it, while dynamic loops will be run in software.

> Are you somehow releated to NV ?

Nope. I work on an independent third-party application, where I have the pleasure and honor to work closely with all of the major hardware vendors (read: we find bugs at times :slight_smile:

We also release a product to our customers, after the product goes through QA. I shudder at the thought of the support nightmare we’d have if arbitrary engineering builds were used un-checked by users. Thus, I can easily imagine all kinds of badness for the ATI folks if this gets out of hand.

For example: we have a compatibility checker that checks your system for basic capabilities (HT&L OpenGL graphics, 256 MB RAM, 800 MHz CPU, proper AGP drivers installed, that kind of thing). However, there is a way past it, and the customers know it. The first thing our customer support people have to ask on every support call is “did you bypass the compatiblity check?” If they forget, they can easily spend lots of time on the phone trouble-shooting a problem that shouldn’t even have happened.