Mesa 5.0 Released
Eugenia writes "Mesa 5.0 has been released. It implements the OpenGL 1.4 specification." There's more information as to what's been fixed/added/changed on their SF.net project page.
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It'd be interresting to know how this release compares to other OpenGL implementations on Windows. Anyone looked into this?
Why Windows? It's always interresting to see how any open software solutions stack up versus their proprietary cousins on a proprietary system.
.: Max Romantschuk
Too bad they never got off their fat, zealotted unshaven unwashed asses and fixed the bug in voodoo5 support (fucking motherfucker crashes when in i686 SMP mode switching from OpenGL mode to any other mode -- text or a different OpenGL mode). I reported this bug a looong time ago but obviously nobody gives a rats ass.
P.S. I bought the voodoo 5500 because of 3dfx's support of the Linux community. Then RIGHT AFTER THAT they get bought out by those proprietary whores at NVidia. FUCK!
I used to use Mesa years ago as a software-only OpenGL-like API, on a system for which there was no OpenGL implementation, but I was writing code to run on a system that did have it (these were MacOS 7.x and an Indy, if memory serves). But if you have an OpenGL driver, what does Mesa do? Surely the libraries that come with the driver implement the API? Or does it just let you write 1.4 code with a card/driver that only supports up to 1.2 in the hardware, and do the new 1.4 features in software?
This is not correct. Future versions of DirectX are always guaranteed to provide the prior COM interfaces. For example, you can have an old DirectX 3 program running just fine under DirectX 8.1.
As for OpenGL being standartized, if you want to support newer features like pixel (fragment) shaders or vertices in AGP memory, you NEED to use vendor extensions, which means separate code for nVidia and ATI.
Mesa is very tightly bound to XFree86. Are there instructions out there for how to replace the Mesa that ships with XFree86 4.x with this new version? Does anyone know when XFree86 4.3 is due out and which Mesa version it will have?
I'd like to try this out and see if I can finally get some decent FPS on my Radeon 7000, but I don't want to sacrifice stability by messing with Mesa if I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Craig Howard