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Mesa 10.2 Improves Linux's Open-Source Graphics Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "Mesa 10.2 was introduced this week as the new shining example of what open source graphics (and open source projects in general) are capable of achieving. The latest release of this often underrepresented open source graphics driver project has many new OpenGL and driver features including a number of new OpenGL 4 extensions. The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver now poses serious competition to Qualcomm's Adreno driver, an OpenMAX implementation was added for Radeon video encoding support, Intel Broadwell support now works better, the software rasterizer supports OpenGL 3.3, and many other changes are present."
I think that Mesa is necessary. I'm developing UI in QtQuick2 and it does only work with OpenGL 2 and above. Since there are platforms that don't support OpenGL 2 I have to have fallback to software rendered graphic. Mesa saves the day. If there was no Mesa, I'd be forced not to use QtQuick2 and stick to Qt widgets, which are not really designed to run well on mobile devices. And for the record, I do think, that QtQuick2 is the future of Gui development.
One day we'll be able to alt-tab in and out of over ten-year-old games!
That's fine, they don't really sell new games anymore. They sell subscriptions to services that resemble games.
I've been following Mesa's development for some time while working on some cross-platform 3D graphics stuff.
Right now Mesa's OpenGL implementation for Intel HD Graphics 4000+ is probably more complete than the Windows driver's. This isn't exactly a trivial accomplishment. A working OpenGL 3.3 implementation is more than what Apple offered for a long time.
Some GL features are obviously not as well optimized in Mesa, but many of them are so bad they're at least "considered harmful" anyway. And with 10.2 we got gems like ARB_buffer_storage, which basically removes the API overhead from accessing the GPU's memory. No more unpredictable stalls while writing data!
Unless your graphics driver provides a full 3D stack (userspace GL libraries down to kernel drivers) you will be using Mesa on Linux. You are probably thinking of Mesa as purely a software renderer whereas it is also used as a frontend to open source 3D drivers and uses DRI to provide access to the hardware's acceleration.
I've yet to see binary any drivers use Mesa.
Then why post on slashdot? Perhaps neowin is better for you?
See below for the comment you likely intended to make before you had a Tourette's spasm
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Mod parent "+1 Wait, what?"
My impression is that basically all Linux distributions install the open source drivers by default. And in my experience, installing the proprietary drivers is messy.
And most distributions uses 3D in the window manager by default.
So I imagine that many more Linux users use the open source drivers (which in turn use Mesa) than uses the proprietary drivers.
QtQuick2 requires OpenGL. I didn't say I'm using OpenGL directly. However there is Qt3D and QtQuick3D that you might have a look at http://doc-snapshot.qt-project... http://doc.qt.digia.com/qt-qui... .
As for the graphs, there are some commercial graphs supplied by digia http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/... or KDAB http://www.kdab.com/kdab-produ... or freely available QWT http://qwt.sourceforge.net/ .
Both ATI and NVidia cards have quite decent functionality on Linux without those vendors' drivers.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)