[Mesa-dev] Project ideas [was Re: Gallium3D and Glide]

[Brian Paul]

On 03/01/2011 12:32 PM, Ian Romanick wrote:
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> On 03/01/2011 05:36 AM, Keith Whitwell wrote:
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>> Create an automated bug-finder for gallium drivers.
>>
>> Step one: create a "split and compare" gallium driver (perhaps based on
>> failover) which runs the same set of commands on two different gallium
>> drivers (eg softpipe and r600g).  At each frame, compare the two images
>> and see if there are differences.
>
> For non-trivial rendering, that had better be an awful fuzzy "compare."
>   All of the 3D rendering specs allow a large amount of variation in
> rasterization rules and precision rules.  Have you ever looked at
> OpenGL's line drawing rules?  Line locations can vary by +/- a pixel in
> any direction.
>
> That's not to say this isn't interesting, but it's probably only
> interesting for comparing the results of different drivers for the same
> hardware (e.g., r600g with and without some change).

A few years ago I did some image comparisons between different drivers 
and the results were actually suprisingly close.  There'd have to a 
fuzz factor, but image comparisons are do-able.

-Brian