Re: [Fresco-devel] questions on OpenGL acceleration for Berlin

On Sat, 2003-03-08 at 08:51, Andy Sy wrote:
> To get Berlin to use OpenGL hardware acceleration
> is it necessary to run it on top of SDL on X 

Yes.

> Will we ever see OpenGL acceleration independent
> of X?

I sure hope so. 

I haven't tried it, but I think if you have a 3dfx card you can try to
use mesa+fullscreen glide acceleration (remember, a Voodoo2 didn't even
have 2D capabilities). 
There's also fbdri.sf.net which is more of a proof of concept of ripping
a dri driver out of X. Works only with a Radeon. 

> 
> Is DRI independent of X?  If it is and if Mesa is
> committed to using DRI for hardware acceleration,
> then wouldn't it make sense to run Berlin on top
> of pure Mesa running on DRI drivers?

Yes it would make sense, sadly DRI is dependent on XFree86 at the
moment. There's some very vague rumblings about rearchitecting it to
decouple it from XFree - it was mentioned in a chat log somewhere I
think. But frankly, I wouldn't count on it any time soon, there's not
even a plan for it - I believe the DRI developers just aren't that
interested in it. 

> Also what about using DirectFB and OpenGL/Mesa on 
> DirectFB?  Does this make any sense?

Well DirectFB is alot like GGI. They have DirectFBGL (using mesa) like
GGI has GGIMesa. They both are software opengl rendering at the moment,
so they're not using the 3D capabilities of your Gfx card. My personal
impression is that GGI is a bit cleaner, but it's been a while since I
looked at DirectFB. 

In any case, neither give you hardware accelerated 3D without X. You'd
need to lobby the DRI developers for that; it simply has never been one
of their goals/requirements. NVidia's driver will probably be stuck to X
for a long while.

-- Mourad