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Graphics Software

Mesa 5.0 Released 142

Posted by Hemos from the make-the-pretty-graphics dept.
Eugenia writes "Mesa 5.0 has been released. It implements the OpenGL 1.4 specification." There's more information as to what's been fixed/added/changed on their SF.net project page.
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Mesa 5.0 Released More

Mesa 5.0 Released

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  • When will Mesa 5.0 be incorporated into Debian stable?

  • cute (Score:5, Funny)

    by sanermind ( 512885 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @06:40AM (#4695671)
    Cute description in the changelog:

    - OpenGL 1.4 support (glGetString(GL_VERSION) returns "1.4")

    So that's all it takes, eh?
    <grin>

  • How does it compare on windows? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Monday November 18, 2002 @06:56AM (#4695712) Homepage
    It'd be interresting to know how this release compares to other OpenGL implementations on Windows. Anyone looked into this?

    Why Windows? It's always interresting to see how any open software solutions stack up versus their proprietary cousins on a proprietary system.
    • I personally would like to see how this compares to the OpenGL implementation in the nVIDIA Linux drivers. Anybody got any benchmark figures?

      • Re:How does it compare on windows? (Score:4, Informative)

        by dinivin ( 444905 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:18AM (#4695910)

        Why would you want to see that comparison? nVidia's Linux drivers are hardware accelerated. Generic Mesa is not.

        Dinivin
        • Well, yeah it is on some cards like 3dfx; but that does not help here of course.
          • No, vanilla Mesa is not accelerated on any cards... When you see it accelerated with 3dfx cards, it's actually compiled against Glide.

            Dinivin
            • It says in the Mesa FAQ that it will be hardware accelerated with DRI when they decide to include it in XFree86
            • Considering the fact that Mesa has a modular rendering system, and the DRI project was made specifically to be a backend for Mesa, your definition of "vanilla" Mesa is kind of limited. The simple fact is that for every video card except nVidia's, the hardware acceleration on linux is done in large part through Mesa, and this will allow existing DRI accelerated cards to get access to OpenGL 1.4 features.
              • your definition of "vanilla" Mesa is kind of limited.

                Uh, no it's not. The Mesa you download from the projects' website is "vanilla" Mesa. There's nothing limiting about that at all. I'm not saying anything bad about it (in fact, I use it every day), but Mesa and DRI are two separate projects, even if some of code (and some of the developers) overlaps.

                Dinivin
        • Let me point readers to the Mesa FAQ:

          ***
          1.2 Does Mesa support/use graphics hardware?

          Yes. Specifically, Mesa serves as the OpenGL core for the XFree86/DRI OpenGL drivers.
          ***

          Now, Mesa does *include* a software rendering engine...

          This could be what you meant, but this is the first post along the "Mesa is nothing more than a software renderer" lines, and there are a *lot* on here, some of which are definitely wrong.
          • Let me say it again:

            Vanilla Mesa does not support hardware acceleration. It never has and it never will.

            The Mesa that's included in the DRI does. That is not vanilla Mesa. If you were to go to the Mesa website, download the latest version, compile and install it, you wouldn't have hardware acceleration (unless you compiled the DRI or compiled Mesa against the Glide libraries, in which case it's no longer vanilla Mesa).

            Dinivin
      • Yes, that would be interesting. The nVidia drivers support a larger feature set than many other commercial OpenGL implementations.

        I think the more interesting question will be 'when will DRI begin to develop with Mesa 5?' Only when libGL.so is hardware accelerated and, therefore, usable does anyone care about feature sets. Unfortunately, the DRI with X4.2 is based on Mesa 3, which doesn't cut the mustard these days.

        Hopefully X4.3 will be released with a very recent trunk build of DRI. TCL support for R100s, at least, should be supported.

        p.s.
        Does anyone from Deb or perhaps the XSF currently package CVS snapshots of the XFree86 tree. Sure, packaging X is not nice, but an unstable package of X for i386 would still be kind of cool for the lazy twiddlers.
    • It's interesting for another reason: some graphics cards only support Direct3D, but Mesa can be used as a wrapper around Direct3D to give you an OpenGL interface. Past examples of such wrappers have performed reasonably well, and since Direct3D has improved, it should only get better.
    • I dunno about this baby, but earlier GL versions are much faster on windows. For a fast machine this change is not noticable. But I run a 600 MHz celeron with 16MB RIVA TNT. I have noticed that tuxracer crawls, but UT runs much faster under higher res. Is it due to GL or due to the game. Also I have noticed that most linux games based on GL really crawl on my machine. I havent tried UT2003 yet, but could anyone enlighten my why this performance difference between linux and win, considering most other apps are much much faster on win.
      • Are you using the nvidia linux drivers? If you are, you're not using Mesa anyway. If you're not, then you've got hardware acceleration under Windows, but no acceleration under Linux, of course there's a big difference.
      • not quite true.

        Dual boot Linux/Win2k, palomino@1667, 512 megs, Geforce4Ti4600.

        Same framerates on Q3/RTCW under win2k and linux (using the same breed of drivers from nVidia).

        You are prolly not using hardware acceleration under linux. Check your drivers.

        cheers.
      • Also I have noticed that most linux games based on GL really crawl on my machine.

        Assuming you mean when running under X and Linux, run glxinfo from a shell. Near the top will be "direct rendering: yes" (or no). If it's no then you're running software OpenGL instead of hardware accelerated OpenGL.
    • Dude ... seriously, they are not cousins, not even long lost relatives. I to would like to see how they stack up against each other. But I think it should be framed more like a family feud than a family reunion.
    • It'd be interresting to know how this release compares to other OpenGL implementations on Windows.

      Compares how? In performance? Or in accuracy?

      Performance numbers wouldn't mean much, since Mesa is software-based.

      As for accuracy, from what I've heard from colleagues, it's sometimes annoying to program OpenGL for Windows since it's not very compliant. I have not seen results of running the standard OpenGL conformance tests on Windows.

  • I don't know what they did (Score:5, Informative)

    by RomikQ ( 575227 ) <romikq@mail.ru> on Monday November 18, 2002 @07:08AM (#4695735) Homepage
    But the new mesa seems to have intelligent workload distribution between the cpu and the gpu, i e

    glxgears running in a small window - 200 fps, average 2% cpu load(with Mesa 4.1 it was 800 fps 100% load),
    running maximized in 1600x1200 - 80 fps, 100% load(exactly as with Mesa 4.1).
    And all the games and etc run at exactly the same speeds with less cpu load.

    All I can say is this is great - nobody needs insane fps numbers above 100 and it saves cpu for my poor apache running in the background :). Server gaming woohoo!

  • I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @07:53AM (#4695841)
    I used to use Mesa years ago as a software-only OpenGL-like API, on a system for which there was no OpenGL implementation, but I was writing code to run on a system that did have it (these were MacOS 7.x and an Indy, if memory serves). But if you have an OpenGL driver, what does Mesa do? Surely the libraries that come with the driver implement the API? Or does it just let you write 1.4 code with a card/driver that only supports up to 1.2 in the hardware, and do the new 1.4 features in software?

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mesa is the driver, the kernel video driver only establishs an underlying layer that makes all brands of video card appear identical to programs like Mesa or X or DirectFB.
      • No, that's not right. Mesa is a software implementation, and a piece of support code for the DRI driver. In a hardware accelerated implementation, you've got a device-specific kernel driver, a device specific OpenGL library, and a device-specific GLX driver.

    • But if you have an OpenGL driver, what does Mesa do?

      a) Shows you how is it done, since you can peer at the source, and b) gives you an alternative if OpenGL is not good enough for you. Small benefits, and you may not care, but for some people these are good qualities.

    • Mesa was originally a software opengl implementation, yes, but now its renderer is modular. In particular, the dri project is built around drivers implementing only extremely low level primitives which are plugged into Mesa which provides the full OpenGL stack to access these drivers. So for hardware acceleration on Linux, every driver uses Mesa except nVidia's which includes its own OpenGL stack.

  • XFree86 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by choward ( 307122 )
    Mesa is very tightly bound to XFree86. Are there instructions out there for how to replace the Mesa that ships with XFree86 4.x with this new version? Does anyone know when XFree86 4.3 is due out and which Mesa version it will have?

    I'd like to try this out and see if I can finally get some decent FPS on my Radeon 7000, but I don't want to sacrifice stability by messing with Mesa if I don't know what I'm doing.

    • Re:XFree86 (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Xfree86 4.3 will not have Mesa 5.0. It is not going to make it into the mainline DRI CVS in time for the merge. It is currently in a separate development branch.

      It will probably get included in 4.3.1 since it is an important feature to many users.
    • According to the XFree86 homepage, 4.3 is due out January 22-24, 2003, to coincide with the Linux World Expo in NYC. More than likely it will ship with Mesa 4.0.4, but you'll need to follow the Xpert mailing list to be sure.

  • Mesa is not hardware accelerated (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jacek Poplawski ( 223457 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @09:58AM (#4696308)
    After reading comments I want to write just one thing: Mesa is not hardware accelerated. There is no point to compare it with nVidia or ATI closed source drivers, there is no point to compare speed of Mesa and Win OpenGL implementation. You can't play any new game with Mesa, because you will get 1-2fps.

    I am not sure why non-developer should download Mesa, probably only if he/she need to run OpenGL application (like Blender for example) and hardware accelerated driver works bad or not exist.
  • All this talk about Mesa, and not one Jar Jar Binks reference?

    "Me-sa like it. Me-sa good!"

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