New Mesa/Nouveau brings support for Fermi cards to AROS!

[paolone]

Both MorphOS 2D&3D drivers are far more stable than AROS ones. And also include overlay.

IMHO it's better to support few hardware pieces very well than supporting a wide range of hardware with less features than the hardware we used to have (PicassoIV/Cybervision3D already had Overlay 15 years ago)

I prefer having excellent support for a few ATI cards than supporting incompletely many brands&models.

BTW, good job, I'm happy for AROS users.

I'd like to know exactly how you can say MOS drivers are "fare more stable" than AROS ones just by adding that the latter don't support overlay (yet). MOS drivers may be more optimized due to the fact their development started far before the ones currently used by AROS, and that they are focalized on a lesser number of GPUS but... well, the world has a little changed in the meanwhile.

In the GPU market a graphic adapter gets old after 6 months and obsolete in 3-4 years. R200 cards (Radeon 7500/9200 and derivated) are now more than 10 years old, and dramatically less performant and feature-wise than current ones. You can't even compare their respective complexity. Short times between hardware refreshes means also a short time window for driver development, and common PC users are now expected to upgrade their video cards from time to time (generally speaking, every 24-30 months or so). How can you pretend to live with 10-years old sw/hw technologies forever in a similar market?

Gallium drivers might not be as optimized and fast like native ones (on the same platform), or like MOS R700 drivers in general, but they support far better and far more interesting technologies. The Nouveau driver might not support overlay at this stage (however, it's not only Nouveau culp), but Gallium supports shading language and as someone pointed before, it can be used to wrap Warp3D/Wazp3D functions over MESA, and hardware-accelerate all the applications using it on far more modern graphic cards.

I feel this a little more interesing than overlay, not counting that overlay is coming in the future, at least according to Nikolaos' efforts.

[paolone]

I have said that AROS drivers are more prone to crash that MorphOS ones. And in addition to that AROS drivers don't even support overlay. Read again what I wrote because I have never claimed that something is less stable due to lack of overlay.

Ok, I had read wrong.

MorphOS drivers are not only more optimized but also more stable, that's my point. On the other hand if Gallium ever got very fast and stable it could be ported to MorphOS. But right now it doesn't make much sense (after all you can't plug in PCIe cards to a powerbook)

But there are Macs with Nvidia cards and you definitely don't need PCI Express to mount GeForce FX card, nor you need PCI Express for GeForce 6 and 7 carda, since there are (have been) AGP models available.

AROS drivers don't even support features from 15 years ago so please stop propaganda about "new features". Overlay IS an important feature.

It's important on low performance systems where 2D acceleration and video decode (which work with overlay) can help the central processor pleaying video clips. It's lesser important with strong CPUs which can easily decode a HD movie at full screen resolution without noticeable lost of frames. Honestly, sometimes I feel the need for overlay on my AROS netbook, but really rarely on my desktop systems. Anyway, overlay should come in the future, so I wouldn't cry too much about it.

Amiga is a hobby and I'm not much concerned about "markets" or pc upgrade cycles. If drivers supporting latest features were so important for me I would be using Windows. Don't get me wrong, the more modern supported cards the better, but I prefer to have very good drivers instead of many modern cards half-supported.

I can bet this will change the day MorphOS will be able to support Radeon HD and GeForce cards too.

MorphOS users interest is with R300 cards right now since that's what is included with Powerbooks and it's easy to plug these cards on Powermacs too. More modern cards may be interesting in the future but not right now.

Are you KIDDING or what?

Better late than never :-)[/QUOTE]

[paolone]

Are you saying that Gallium has OpenCL now? As far as I can tell the GPGPU acceleration currently depends on the closed source proprietary drivers provided by the vendors (nVidia, AMD), even on Linux.

If you're just talking about shaders, well I don't find them so exciting, at least when considering the monster cards such as Fermi. If hardly makes a difference if you can render your game in 60fps versus 600fps.

What does OpenCL have to do with Warp3D/Wazp3D I was talking about?

Anyway, to answer to your question: AROS won't have OpenCL until someone will write a implementation of OpenCL for Gallium 3D. The good news, however, is that's technically feasible.