On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 04:28:12PM -0700, Allen Akin wrote: > One open question is the usage model for such an extension. Keith > suggested that developers will write a small number of code paths, and > then the app will choose one of these at runtime. Typically it'll > choose the "grooviest" path that is accelerated. I think Ian and I > mostly agree with this; I don't remember whether Brian went along with > it.
After the meeting, I thought of another possible usage. A number of companies, most notably id Software, are using home-grown shading languages. Depending on the set of available hardware features, they pick a different back-end for their shading compiler. > 1. We could enumerate a set of features that represent big > chunks of functionality. The app can test for the features it > needs at a very high level. For example: [snip] > 2. We could keep state information that determines whether a > fallback occurred. The app could reset it, perform a few > operations, then test it to see if any of those operations > caused a fallback. For example: [snip] > 3. D3D allegedly uses a "pipeline validation" scheme in which you > set up the rendering pipeline according to the code path you > want to use, then query the driver to see if that path is > accelerated. We could do something similar, though we might > want to generalize the query to include the type of drawing > operation you want to perform; otherwise there's no way to > distinguish between the behavior of, say, drawing triangles vs. > glDrawPixels(). [snip] I think this covers what was discussed pretty well. I had another thought about option 3. Would it be possible to implement that as a different RenderMode? In that respect, it would work similarly to HP_occlusion_test. -- Smile! http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990315.html ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net emial is sponsored by: Influence the future of Java(TM) technology. Join the Java Community Process(SM) (JCP(SM)) program now. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;4699841;7576301;v?http://www.sun.com/javavote _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
