very promising development release of Mesa announced
This is a very wicked release of Mesa I’m happy to read about. The two coolest bits are the new DRI memory manager and the almost finished support for OpenG 2.0 and 2.1. Finally people on OSS graphics-drivers are very close to reach feature-parity with nvidia’s proprietary driver, which is a very good thing!
December 5th, 2006 at 2:00 am
Nice, but I fear they still have a long way to go till they reach speed parity.
December 5th, 2006 at 2:06 am
@ pete: Probably, but in order to help them get there we should make sure to keep pushing the driver and framework with interesting and demanding applications. If they have enough code to go around leveraging FBOs, vertex/fragment-programs (no compiz alone isn’t enough *g*) it is more satisfying for them to see their hard labour put to good use… and this in turn motivates far more to keep improving the driver and framework.
December 5th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Demanding applications are already there, e.g. 3D animation suites like Maya, Softimage or Blender. Not to forget all these ports of id Software\’s and epic\’s games (Quake, Doom, Unreal), that clearly show how much free drivers lag behind their proprietary counterparts.
December 6th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
@ pete: I implicitly meant desktop-apps pushing those drivers more. Those very special programs like Blender, Maya, Softimage and games I do not call "every day desktop apps" *g*