[Mesa-dev] Mixing of hardware and software renderers

[Dave Airlie]

On 6 May 2014 14:51, Patrick McMunn <doctorwhoguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm using some older hardware - an ATI Radeon 9200 - which can only handle
> up to OpenGL 1.2. I was wondering if it's possible to use the hardware
> renderer generally and have the driver hand off the handling of functions
> which my video card can't handle (such as functions from a higher OpenGL
> version) to the software render and then the software render hand control
> back to the hardware renderer once it's finished. If this isn't currently
> possible, is this perhaps a feature which might appear in the future?

It generally isn't possible and isn't worth it.

Pingpong between hw and sw renderers and the fact that sw renderers
are slow makes it unlikely you could do something like this practically.

Either run a sw renderer, or get a better gpu.

Dave.