Nouveau 5.30 driver for AROS available!

[deadwood]

A new version of nouveau 2D/3D driver is now available for AROS. Focus in this release is the increase of performance in 2D operations.

Major features:
- 2D driver alpha blended operations (WritePixelArrayAlpha) using 3D hardware acceleration on all families of nVidia cards. GeForce 1-4 family cards use fixed function registers, newer family cards use programmable shaders. This is first AROS driver that uses 3D rendering for 2D blending operations. Reported tests show increase from 20MB/s -> 800 MB/s for PCI-E cards.
- performance improvements to font rendering - using 3D hardware acceleration for anti-aliased font rendering

Other changes:
- performance improvements to compositing - measurable at about 10% increase in FPS output
- fix problem with jittered output for high frame rate applications
- updated sources to 2011-03-19 nouveau driver
- allow smaller (32x32) RAM->VRAM transfers to go via GART as well - 2 x performance improvement for such transfers

The driver will be found in latest AROS nightly builds or can be downloaded from:

http://download.aros3d.org/releases/nouveau-hidd-5.30.zip

I would like to give thanks to all dedicated testers who helped iron out the bugs and performance problems.

[Karlos]

Nice work!

This is first AROS driver that uses 3D rendering for 2D blending operations. Reported tests show increase from 20MB/s -> 800 MB/s for PCI-E cards.

You can't beat a good old factor of 40 speed increase

[XDelusion]

Sounds promising!

[nicholas]

Why on earth don't MorphOS and OS4 use this excellent work?

NIH syndrome?

[XDelusion]

They all work very differently under the hood.

[Iggy]

They all work very differently under the hood.

Yes, at this point the MOS team has rejected Gallium and Nouveau.

[XDelusion]

As a MorphOS user, I'm not complaining. And considering the updates that are coming along in the next addition of MorphOS in relation to 3D acceleration, I'm REALLY not complaining!

It's stable, it's fast, it's compatible, it's here, it's now, though I am eager to purchase a 100% AROS compatible machine such as an ACER Laptop or so I can actually see what the hypes all about.

[dammy]

:banana:

[TheBilgeRat]

The Nouveau drivers are excellent when it comes to 2D, but Gallium has a long way to go, which is why MorphOS team probably decided against.  However, the future is tied decently to both, as the Linux world is trying hard to get good stable open source drivers based on nouveau and gallium.

Great to hear that AROS has got it now :afro:

[Karlos]

Why on earth don't MorphOS and OS4 use this excellent work?

NIH syndrome?

A bit too different under the bonnet, I expect.

[HenryCase]

A bit too different under the bonnet, I expect.

Gallium3D support is part of the current OS4 roadmap.

[Iggy]

Gallium3D support is part of the current OS4 roadmap.

As is OpenGL from what I've heard.
Both will strengthen AOS4 against the competition.

[Piru]

Gallium3D support is part of the current OS4 roadmap.

Being on roadmap doesn't say much though. Just think of what happened with the USB2 support.

[DCAmiga]

Good news I may even make my x86 an AROS box one day

[HenryCase]

As is OpenGL from what I've heard.
Both will strengthen AOS4 against the competition.

Gallium3D is part of Mesa, which is the premier open-source OpenGL implementation. You wouldn't get Gallium3D without Mesa, they're part of the same package (AROS has it too).

One point that's worth mentioning is that some of the newer features of OpenGL haven't been implemented in Mesa yet due to license restrictions, which is a bit of a shame. In any case, Mesa is a lot more complete than OS4's current OpenGL implementation.