[Mesa-dev] Nuking GL_NV_vertex_program

[Brian Paul]

On 10/10/2012 09:08 AM, Brian Paul wrote:
> On 10/10/2012 08:59 AM, Kenneth Graunke wrote:
>> On 10/10/2012 07:42 AM, Jose Fonseca wrote:
>>> I think certain versions of SPEC viewperf rely on NV_vertex_program.
>>> See http://www.mesa3d.org/viewperf.html
>>>
>>> We had some internal hacks to support just the bare minimum of to
>>> run some of these tests, but they were not accepted on mesa proper.
>>> (There is some bug report on fdo about it).
>>>
>>> Jose
>>
>> Ugh. I'd forgotten about SPECviewperf.
>>
>> I guess this begs the question: do we care?
>>
>> According to that page, viewperf11 is a buggy application (using
>> extensions without checking for them), and to get it working properly,
>> we'd need to implement two more legacy extensions that aren't
>> necessary for anything else. Or add the minimum required and driconf
>> workarounds to falsely advertise them.
>>
>> In my experience, viewperf is extremely frustrating to work with and
>> isn't useful for testing either correctness nor performance. The only
>> reason anyone appears to care is that it's some kind of "industry
>> standard" benchmark. These days, however, it seems more people care
>> about glbenchmark.com's benchmarks, 3DMarkMobileES 2.0, and various
>> games. At least on my team, no one is measuring us against
>> SPECviewperf.
>>
>> Do people still care about viewperf on your side?
>
> Unfortunately, the people that review VMware's products (Workstation,
> Fusion, etc) often run Viewperf and we've been dinged by reviewers
> when they find issues with it. Part of the motivation for creating
> http://www.mesa3d.org/viewperf.html was to educate reviewers about the
> issues with Viewperf 11.
>
> I've reported the VP11 issues to SPEC and was told that they'd be
> addressed for Viewperf 12. Unfortunately, there's no way for the
> public to review/test VP12 before it's released (at least not without
> paying a very hefty membership fee) so we have to just cross our
> fingers that VP12 will be better implemented than VP11.
>
> Can we please hold off on this change for just a bit while we review
> the situation?

OK, I think it's good news.

I hadn't looked at VP in a while but it looks like all the 
vertex/fragment programs are actually of the ARB variety, not the NV 
variety.

The catia-03 test uses GL_NV_fragment_program2 and 
GL_NV_vertex_program3 (without checking if they're actually 
supported!) but those extensions are layered on 
GL_ARB_vertex/fragment_program, not GL_NV_vertex/fragment_program.

The VP source code definitely has calls to glProgramStringARB() but I 
don't see any calls to glLoadProgramNV() which is what NV programs use.

So, I think we're OK with viewperf.

I'll do a review of Eric's patches too...

-Brian