[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 00/25] i915 HW context support

[Ben Widawsky]

On Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:08:10 -0700
Kenneth Graunke <kenneth at whitecape.org> wrote:

> On 06/04/2012 10:53 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
> >>
> >> I've run these on various workloads and saw nothing worth mentioning.
> > 
> > Nothing at all? no speedups, slowdowns, etc
> > 
> > why should we merge all this code then :-)
> > 
> > Dave.
> 
> Preserving hardware state across batches is going to be necessary for:
> 
> * Transform feedback in the presence of geometry shaders
> 
>   Right now, Mesa counts the number of primitives emitted on the CPU,
>   relies on the kernel resetting the register to 0, and offset values
>   in software.  With GS, we obviously can't count primitives on the CPU.
> 
> * Primitive restart in hardware
> 
> and seems to be increasingly necessary for new features as we move
> forward.  So we'd like to get it in place; we can cut more state uploads
> and tune Mesa further once it's there.

Also, my testing was far from comprehensive.

-- 
Ben Widawsky, Intel Open Source Technology Center