[Mesa-dev] gallium scaled types

[Jose Fonseca]

----- Original Message -----
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Roland Scheidegger
> <sroland at vmware.com> wrote:
> > Am 11.09.2011 19:17, schrieb Dave Airlie:
> >> On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:11 AM, Dave Airlie <airlied at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>> Hi guys,
> >>>
> >>> not really finding a great explaination in my 2 minute search, of
> >>> what
> >>> the USCALED and SSCALED types are representative of
> >>>
> >>> On r600 hw at least we have a SCALED type, which seems to be an
> >>> integer in float point format, as well as an INT type which is
> >>> natural
> >>> integers.
> >>
> >> Talked on irc with calim and mareko, makes sense now, need to add
> >> UINT/SINT types
> >> will document things maybe a bit more on my way past.
> >>
> >> will also rename the stencil types.
> >
> >
> > Hmm what's wrong with them?
> > USCALED is a unsigned int type which in contrast to UNORM isn't
> > normalized but "scaled" to the actual value (so same as UINT
> > really).
> > Same for SSCALED which is just signed instead of unsigned.
> > And the stencil types seem to fit already.
> 
> No, they are not.
> 
> SCALED is an int that is automatically converted to float when
> fetched
> by a shader.
> 
> The SCALED types are OpenGL's non-normalized *float* vertex formats
> that are stored in memory as ints, e.g. glVertexAttribPointer(...
> GL_INT ...). There are no SCALED textures or renderbuffers supported
> by any hardware or exposed by any API known to me. Radeons seem to be
> able to do SCALED types according to the ISA docs, but in practice it
> only works with vertex formats and only with SCALED8 and SCALED16
> (AFAIK).
> 
> Then there should be the standard INT types that are not converted to
> float upon shader reads. Those can be specified as vertices by
> glVertexAttribIPointer(... GL_INT ...) (note the *I*), or as integer
> textures. This is really missing in Gallium.

Pipe formats describe how the data should be interpreted.

IMO, the type of register they will be stored after interpretation is beyond the the scope of pipe_format.  I think that is purely in the realm of shaders.

For example, when doing texture sampling, if PIPE_R32G32B32A32_SSCALED should be read into a integer register or float registers should be decided by the texture sample opcode.  Not the pipe_format.

And in the case of vertex shaders inputs, the desired register type (float, int, double) should be not in pipe_vertex_element at all, but probably in the shader input declaration. Given that it ties more closely with shader itself: an integer vertex input will be used usually with integer opcodes, and vice-versa. Independent of the actually vertices being stored in the vertex buffer as integers or not.

Jose