On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 06:47:26PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: | ... | At some point that won't be true any more. And maybe it's just me, but | with programmable vertex and pixel shaders it looks like the onus is | shifting onto the _user_, and it's more likely that the hardware designs | won't be changing as radically as they used to.
That's possible. I often wonder whether Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation is still spinning. It may be that once we understand which graphics primitives *should* be hardwired, because they're flexible enough to cover the needs of the market and the performance advantages are compelling, then programmability will fall out of favor. (This has happened many times already in the graphics world, both 2D and 3D.) Or it may be that commercial issues (like the constraints of Microsoft's business model on the hardware vendors) will stop us at this stage, and graphics will begin to look a lot more like general-purpose computing. (As you suggested.) Only the first case permits long-term improvement that's much better than Moore's Law. I'd like to think we still have a few more spins of the Wheel to go, but at the moment the evidence for that is weak. | ... | If and when a driver decides that they can do something better _without_ | the help of generic code, it just expands the functionality itself - | without breaking anything else, and without taking the overhead of having | to go through any generic code that conditionally calls to the direct | stuff. Sure. Vertical modularity, rather than horizontal. It works well as long as there's not too much shared state that has to be kept in sync for all the code paths. (By the way, this is one area where I suspect current low-level 3D APIs are making life unnecessarily difficult for us.) | > Once you get rid of the legacy stuff in OpenGL, drivers are pretty much | > the same level of complexity for OpenGL as for D3D. Which is one reason | > why several groups are able to use OpenGL subsets for embedded apps. | | I'll take your word for it. I'm not an expert on it -- I'm just going by what I've heard in open ARB discussions. Embedded OpenGL-subset drivers are dropping below 50KB these days. (Depends a lot on the underlying hardware, of course.) Allen ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
