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Last time i checked (which was about a couple of months ago), Mesa had very primitive support for display lists (most of the time you get a command playback tho

Last time i checked (which was about a couple of months ago), Mesa had very primitive support for display lists (most of the time you get a command playback though if you only submit vertex commands it gets converted to VBO - and i think that was added recently-ish) whereas Nvidia's perform optimizations in background threads to convert in the best GPU format, split as necessary to minimum calls and when rendering it performs culling before processing the full list. AMD's Windows drivers also do some of that stuff (though not all). Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. From what i remember until AMD pushed some devs on it, they didn't care about supporting the entire API at all. Vulkan support is most likely good though. (EDIT: yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it - Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL )

shmerl 6y ago
ACO developers will work on OpenGL at some point too. OpenGL in general isn't the case I worry about, as long as it performs sufficiently well. All modern things should be using Vulkan anyway, especially if something requires focus on performance. And deprecated features? I think there are better things to focus on first optimization wise.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Well, the original comparison was with Nvidia's driver and Nvidia has a much more optimized driver. Also it is much more practical (and realistic) to have a few devs optimize a handful of API implementations than expect the thousands of devs who work on thousands of applications to do that (also why OpenGL etc isn't going anywhere).
  - shmerl 6y ago
    > Well, the original comparison was with Nvidia's driver and Nvidia has a much more optimized driver. I wouldn't say that. In all common cases they don't. And as above, deprecated features is the last thing I'd start comparing that on. If you use something deprecated, worrying about performance shouldn't be the case, rather you should worry about rewriting your code.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      That sounds just like sour grapes :-P "Mesa is as fast as Nvidia" "But they are slower in these cases" "That doesn't count".
account42 6y ago
> Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. There is always more that could be optimized, especially when it comes to niche use cases, but generally Mesa/radeonsi do a decent job of making things fast. > yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it By "lot of applications" you mean some workstation applications that refuse to upgrade their code. You can still use AMD's closed source driver on Linux if you need optimizations for those. If you don't (and most people won't) then Mesa works extremely well. > Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL You could argue for drivers not providing newer features in the compatibility profile (and Mesa did that until recently) but as long as there are customers demanding support for newer features while refusing to move off the older APIs, this is what you will get. I don't think having OpenGL Core and OpenGL Compat sharing some of the API hurt anything here.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > There is always more that could be optimized, especially when it comes to niche use cases, but generally Mesa/radeonsi do a decent job of making things fast. Sure, i didn't dispute that, what i wrote was that Nvidia's drivers are faster in some cases based on code i've actually seen. And they used to be slower until not too long ago in that case too, so it isn't like they aren't improving. But still Nvidia's implementation is faster. > By "lot of applications" you mean some workstation applications that refuse to upgrade their code. You can still use AMD's closed source driver on Linux if you need optimizations for those. If you don't (and most people won't) then Mesa works extremely well. I mean games, applications and tools, not workstation applications. Not every application uses the latest and -rarely- greatest version of everything out there nor all applications are always updated - or even under development (especially games). Those that are may have other priorities too. But why an applications uses some API is irrelevant, the important part is that the API is being used and one implementation is faster than another, showing that that other implementation has room for improvement. > You could argue for drivers not providing newer features in the compatibility profile (and Mesa did that until recently) but as long as there are customers demanding support for newer features while refusing to move off the older APIs, this is what you will get. I don't think having OpenGL Core and OpenGL Compat sharing some of the API hurt anything here. My point was that the split itself was a mistake (it isn't like splitting OpenGL into Core and Compatibility was a mandate from heaven -or hell- it was something Khronos came up with) and the hurt was that it make things complicated for a lot of people (e.g. not everyone cares about having the best performance out there - some applications are, e.g., tools that wont even come close to using even a 1% of a GPU's power, but they'd still prefer to rely only on open APIs instead of some proprietary one or some library that may be abandoned next year - code written for OpenGL 1.x 25 years ago can still work fine in modern PCs after all) and split the OpenGL community into two "camps". This created issues like libraries and tools only supporting one version or the other, tons of bugs and wasted time for "integrating" to Core (or supporting both Compatibility and Core), invalidating a ton of existing knowledge and books (OpenGL being backwards compatible down to 1.0 is very helpful since you can always start at the beginning with something proven and work your way towards more modern functionality in an as-needed basis) and at the end all of that was a huge waste of time since everyone outside Apple decided that Compatibility is necessary - and Apple decided that splitting OpenGL in two halves wasn't enough, so they made everyone's life even harder and came up with a proprietary API all on their own.

shmerl 6y ago

ACO developers will work on OpenGL at some point too. OpenGL in general isn't the case I worry about, as long as it performs sufficiently well. All modern things should be using Vulkan anyway, especially if something requires focus on performance. And deprecated features? I think there are better things to focus on first optimization wise.

badsectoracula 6y ago
Well, the original comparison was with Nvidia's driver and Nvidia has a much more optimized driver. Also it is much more practical (and realistic) to have a few devs optimize a handful of API implementations than expect the thousands of devs who work on thousands of applications to do that (also why OpenGL etc isn't going anywhere).
- shmerl 6y ago
  > Well, the original comparison was with Nvidia's driver and Nvidia has a much more optimized driver. I wouldn't say that. In all common cases they don't. And as above, deprecated features is the last thing I'd start comparing that on. If you use something deprecated, worrying about performance shouldn't be the case, rather you should worry about rewriting your code.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    That sounds just like sour grapes :-P "Mesa is as fast as Nvidia" "But they are slower in these cases" "That doesn't count".

account42 6y ago

> Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. There is always more that could be optimized, especially when it comes to niche use cases, but generally Mesa/radeonsi do a decent job of making things fast. > yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it By "lot of applications" you mean some workstation applications that refuse to upgrade their code. You can still use AMD's closed source driver on Linux if you need optimizations for those. If you don't (and most people won't) then Mesa works extremely well. > Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL You could argue for drivers not providing newer features in the compatibility profile (and Mesa did that until recently) but as long as there are customers demanding support for newer features while refusing to move off the older APIs, this is what you will get. I don't think having OpenGL Core and OpenGL Compat sharing some of the API hurt anything here.

badsectoracula 6y ago
> There is always more that could be optimized, especially when it comes to niche use cases, but generally Mesa/radeonsi do a decent job of making things fast. Sure, i didn't dispute that, what i wrote was that Nvidia's drivers are faster in some cases based on code i've actually seen. And they used to be slower until not too long ago in that case too, so it isn't like they aren't improving. But still Nvidia's implementation is faster. > By "lot of applications" you mean some workstation applications that refuse to upgrade their code. You can still use AMD's closed source driver on Linux if you need optimizations for those. If you don't (and most people won't) then Mesa works extremely well. I mean games, applications and tools, not workstation applications. Not every application uses the latest and -rarely- greatest version of everything out there nor all applications are always updated - or even under development (especially games). Those that are may have other priorities too. But why an applications uses some API is irrelevant, the important part is that the API is being used and one implementation is faster than another, showing that that other implementation has room for improvement. > You could argue for drivers not providing newer features in the compatibility profile (and Mesa did that until recently) but as long as there are customers demanding support for newer features while refusing to move off the older APIs, this is what you will get. I don't think having OpenGL Core and OpenGL Compat sharing some of the API hurt anything here. My point was that the split itself was a mistake (it isn't like splitting OpenGL into Core and Compatibility was a mandate from heaven -or hell- it was something Khronos came up with) and the hurt was that it make things complicated for a lot of people (e.g. not everyone cares about having the best performance out there - some applications are, e.g., tools that wont even come close to using even a 1% of a GPU's power, but they'd still prefer to rely only on open APIs instead of some proprietary one or some library that may be abandoned next year - code written for OpenGL 1.x 25 years ago can still work fine in modern PCs after all) and split the OpenGL community into two "camps". This created issues like libraries and tools only supporting one version or the other, tons of bugs and wasted time for "integrating" to Core (or supporting both Compatibility and Core), invalidating a ton of existing knowledge and books (OpenGL being backwards compatible down to 1.0 is very helpful since you can always start at the beginning with something proven and work your way towards more modern functionality in an as-needed basis) and at the end all of that was a huge waste of time since everyone outside Apple decided that Compatibility is necessary - and Apple decided that splitting OpenGL in two halves wasn't enough, so they made everyone's life even harder and came up with a proprietary API all on their own.