It would have to be OpenGL only, not DGA or X11.
I think this is a fine idea and I'm glad someone finally had
the gumption to try it. Post processing effects are a natural
task for the graphics card.
I'm glad Matthew mentioned keeping a fallback path for old
graphics cards without fragment shaders. Maybe I'm just being
"Captain Obvious", but I'd also like to point out a couple of
things along the same lines.
1. We should establish a baseline level of shader support that
we need early on. Remember that older cards with older
fragment shaders have severe limits on abilities and the max
length of the shader. It would be nice to set a moderately
high bar. When people talk about multipassing through multiple
shaders I start to cringe.
Multipassing shaders gets ugly really fast, especially when you
use P-Buffers. I guarantee Hans will hear no end of
performance complaints when that happens. ("But it works on
card N? Why not card A?" "How come it's so slow on IRIX with
the IRIX fragment shader?") Please, please beware of
multipassing. Avoid it entirely if you can. At the very least
please test it on nvidia, radeon, and firegl X drivers before
releasing it into the wild.
2. Platform independence. Either continue writing the shaders
in assembly as you are now, or use a vendor-neutral language
(namely, OpenGL's shader language). Again, test test test.
And thanks for spearheading the first cut attempt, Matthew.
--- Christopher Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This is an interesting topic, it has never occured to me to
> offload
> effects code onto a GPU. As an end-user this would be a very
> nice
> feature to have. With some of the effects, I can't even get
> pacman to
> run fullspeed with both artwork and advance effects. Would
> it make
> sense to use the new effects with other X11 modes like DGA,
> or does it
> have to be opengl only? I know Hans has recently been
> working on the
> effects code, I'd be interested to read what his thoughts are
> on this.
>
> Regards,
> Chris
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Dress up your holiday email, Hollywood style. Learn more.
http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
Xmame mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://toybox.twisted.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/xmame
