visual crack with free drivers

Recent hacking:
Always interesting to see what’s possible with “old” hardware (three years old intel i915 in this case), if you care to properly look into its capabilities and make use of it. Even if it’s hard and more work than on other platforms or GPUs. And there’s more in the pipe.

gl-cairo-aatrick-effects
(click for full view)

Elsewhere:
Kristian Høgsberg and Dave Airlie at work doing mighty fine work with redirected direct rendering on free drivers.

So something like this…

argb-glx-visual-crack
(click for full view)

… which currently only works with nvidia and their proprietary driver, will finally be possible on a composited desktop with free drivers. Sweet and wicked times ahead!

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine what kind of “super-hideous” visuals we’ll be tossing around soon (er or later).

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 4:04 pm and is filed under OpenGL, cairo, gtk+. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “visual crack with free drivers”

  1. Chris Says:
    August 11th, 2007 at 10:45 pm

    Could this be done with the S3 savage driver or is the hardware too old?

    It would be nice to use the 3d hardware as it just sitting there.

  2. MacSlow Says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    @ Chris: I don’t believe the S3’s Savage graphics-chip has any programmable shader-pipleline. Isn’t it even a pre-GeForce4 chip? You can check for yourself, if it provides the needed OpenGL-extensions. Do…

    glxinfo -l | grep GL_ARB_fragment_program
    glxinfo -l | grep GL_ARB_vertex_program

    … and you will see.

  3. MDK Says:
    August 13th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    I don’t think that would work with the GPU on i915. It doesn’t have any shader support.

  4. MacSlow Says:
    August 13th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    @ MDK: It certainly does! I have it here in front of me working on my Sony Vaio VGN-S580BH, which happens to be based on an i915. The i915 and its driver provide GL_ARB_fragment_program and GL_ARB_vertex_program. Afaik it has 8 fragment-shader units and one vertex-shader unit. The fragment-shaders are definitly dedicated hardware in the GPU. But since the T&L in the i915 is supposed to be software-driven, I am not sure if the one vertex-shader unit is really fully implemented in hardware on the i915.

  5. MDK Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 8:54 pm

    Wow, that’s big news to me. I’m running on a i915-based laptop too, and it doesn’t seem to report the GL_ARB_fragment_program… need to investigate.

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