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Man, that's so cool. When things became quiet around the GPU work and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. That ho
by solarkraft 4y ago
Man, that's so cool. When things became quiet around the GPU work and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. That hope is back!
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago> and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. I think the quote you're thinking of was a reference to modern OpenGL and Vulkan support, not accelerated graphics in general. Older OpenGL is a lot easier to implement, and sufficient for an accelerated desktop and games like Minecraft. Marcan and Alyssa have been saying for a while that we were on track to get GPU acceleration in the near-ish future.
- shmerl 4y agoMay be Vulkan can be the first priority since OpenGL can be provided by Zink when it's in good shape.
- dagmx 4y agoVulkan is a lot more work to get to, with far fewer applications using it. It would be a worse ROI, and take significantly longer to make an OS that can be a daily driver for most people.
- shmerl 4y agoNot sure if OpenGL 4.0-4.6 is less work in general. I'd argue implementing Vulkan gives the best ROI, since it gives all OpenGL after that without extra effort. And I don't think that few applications use it. Anything modern tries to. The rest are planning to move to it.
- dagmx 4y agoWhat common or high profile applications do you think actively target Vulkan? Outside of games very few do in my experience but I’d love to see some examples outside what I know of.
- shmerl 4y agoWayland compositors are going to switch to it, with some already doing it (like Sway). Video players like mpv use it. Blender has some plan for it. Basically, it's the way forward, not OpenGL.
- rowanG077 4y agoSure. No one disagrees with that. But if you have the choice 5 years of no workable GPU. Or 2 year of no GPU, then have a workable opengl driver. And then after 4 additional years you have a vulkan driver.
- dagmx 4y agoSure, but that’s in the future and they aren’t not going to add Vulkan. But it makes sense to prioritize GL for now, especially because a lot of the GL work comes much easier thanks to their prior MESA work. Even amongst your list, I don’t see mass adoption of the applications today that don’t also have a GL backend. Blender alone will be a gargantuan uplift to get to Vulkan because so much of the ecosystem is coded agains GL directly.
- shmerl 4y agoThis kind of experimental project above looks pretty well aligned with where things are heading, so I think focus on Vulkan would be still fitting. Meaning by the time it will be more usable, Vulkan will be more used as well. And as above, if you implement Vulkan - you get OpenGL through Zink. If you implement OpenGL - you still have to implement Vulkan. So with limited resources, the first option looks way more effective.
- dagmx 4y ago
- rowanG077 4y agoI believe, and I couldn't quickly find it in the docs, that Mesa provides certain OpenGL versions if you have implement certain OpenGLES version. For for example if you have OpenGLES3 you get OpenGL 3 for free via Mesa (These version numbers are made up, I don't actually know which OGL version can be implemented in terms of OGLES)
- PixelOfDeath 4y agoIt's the other way around. GLES Versions become a subset of later OpenGL Versions.
- rowanG077 4y agoFrom a spec based standpoint you maybe right but I'm clearly not talking about that. Else it wouldn't be possible that Asahi linux is running non-ES OpenGL based application when there is ONLY an openGL ES driver.