[Mesa-dev] gallium scaled types

[Marek Olšák]

José,

I understand what you are trying to tell me, but it's not good enough
to convince me. I am mainly advocating what maps nicely to my hardware
and what appears to be a sane long-term solution in my opinion. The
Translate example might not be relevant, because it doesn't work how
hardware does.

To me, the pipe_format defines how a value in memory is stored in a
shader register. There is no fetch-as-float or fetch-as-int function.
There is just fetch(), and the pipe_format defines how the fetch
function looks like, including type conversions.

The fact we'd need a can-be-converted-to-float flag in the
is_format_supported query just proves my point that it's an essential
property of pipe_format, so essential that it can completely change
the outcome of the query.

IMO, the only two good arguments for not adding new formats have been:
- It would be less work. (can't argue with that)
- Let's not pollute pipe formats with formats that are only used by a
vertex fetcher. (heh, good one! but then you can no longer claim that
vertex and texture formats are unified)

The Radeon drivers don't really have any switch(pipe_format)
statements for vertices and textures. They just generate something
like a "hardware fetch description" directly from
util_format_description. The is_format_supported query is implemented
in the exact same way - we just examine whether the hardware can do
what util_format_description describes. There is no table of supported
formats. You can easily see why I'd like to have the pure ints somehow
expressed through util_format_description. We still have
switch(pipe_format) statements for colorbuffers though.

Marek