[cairo] glitz and shader programs

Vladimir Vukicevic vladimir at pobox.com
Tue Apr 27 01:38:46 PDT 2004


Jon Smirl wrote:

> There are zero open source shader implementations and no hardware manufacturer
> has released the docs needed to build one. Since we need Mesa to build a
> standalone OpenGL there is no solution for Mesa and glitz.

I was under the impression that Mesa already had ARB_vertex_program and 
ARB_fragment_program implemented; are you referring to the docs needed 
to implement shaders in Mesa using the native hardware shader architecture?

Going forward, I don't really see any of the major players (read: nvidia 
and ATI) becoming any more "open source" friendly, as far as hardware 
documentation goes -- we'll probably be stuck with proprietary drivers 
for some time now, fairly good ones in nvidia's case, and horrid ones in 
ATI's case.

The question then becomes whether purely software Mesa can be fast 
enough to deliver a desktop based on the features that glitz wants to 
use, so that it can be considered "baseline functionality", no?

	- Vlad





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