[Mesa-dev] new i965g pipe driver for Intel GEN6 (and later)

[Kenneth Graunke]

On 04/16/2013 10:35 AM, Michael Karcher wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 16.04.2013, 10:23 -0700 schrieb Matt Turner:
>>>> waste. It wasn't uncommon for a user to waste a nontrivial amount of
>>>> someone's time in #intel-gfx only to discover that they were trying to
>>>> use the (old) i965g driver that no one maintained.
>>> I wonder, should i965g be built by default?  Or should you have to
>>> explicitly request it via --with-gallium-drivers=i965?  The thinking is that
>>> the default should be to build the drivers most people want to use.
>>
>> The old i965g driver wasn't built by default. It still caused
>> confusion and wasted time.
>
> On a related issue, I want to tell you that I really like that the i915g
> driver has not been abandoned! It enables me to play games that make use
> of vertex shaders on my GMA950 notebook with decent performance (thanks
> to llvmpipe). The classic mesa vertex shader emulation pipeline does not
> provide comparable performance. Having to compile from source to get the
> i915g is not a problem for me, but it makes it harder for me to tell
> other people: "This game will work on your system, you *just* have to
> compile your own mesa"...

Yeah, I've definitely wondered whether just going with i915g would be a 
good idea.  There's still a fairly substantial piglit test delta between 
the two drivers, and it would be great to resolve that.

> I suspect there might be a comparable need for a i965g driver, as that
> chip has no vertex shader hardware.

i965 is fully programmable.  It can do vertex, geometry, hull, domain, 
and fragment shading in hardware.  The only thing the i965 classic 
driver uses software rendering for is some deprecated and rarely used GL 
1.x features.

--Ken