[Intel-gfx] GMA 950 Intel 945G gallium driver

[Stéphane Marchesin]

On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Emam Hossain <imamdxl8805 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
>
> Recently I have tested one of my old desktop which got Intel 945G on a
> Dual Core CPU. I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 with XServer 1.11, kernel 3.2
> and xf86-video-intel 2.18.
>
> What I have found that Gallium driver i915g from Mesa 7.11 and 8 is
> performing better than officially supported DRI i915 driver.
>
> For example, when tested against the following games:
>
> BEEP, http://www.desura.com/games/beep (gallium plays fine while dri not)
> BIT.TRIP.RUNNER from humble bundle,
> http://bittripgame.com/bittrip-runner.html  (gallium smooth gameplay, dri
> slow)
> and many more.
>
> Moreover, Windows games with WINE are not playable at all or broken with
> DRI driver while runs good with gallium. For example with games:
>
> Need for Speed Underground
> Flatout 1
> Need for Speed Most Wanted
>
> gallium does the job while DRI does not.
>
> So, my question is why dont support gallium driver when it is performing
> better than DRI driver. why not make gallium driver better since Intel 945G
> does not have hardware support for many features, DRI driver is just slow
> for modern games except GL 1.1 games while gallium driver making use of CPU
> to perform those missing hardware features and making games at least run.
> Moreover, Windows driver does similar approach like gallium 3D.
>
>
I feel that the reason is that the classic i915 driver is in maintenance
mode and focus is on newer GPUs. The gallium i915 driver is what we use on
some Chrome OS machines, and that's the main reason I've been working on it.

With that said, I'm pondering exposing GL 2.1 on it, since it seems legit
per the spec to hack sRGB texture support with U8 + fragment shader
instructions. That'd allow some unigine-based games to run.

Stéphane
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