Jon Smirl wrote:
Sharing graphics contexts is not the same thing as allowing two completely
different device drivers access to the hardware on VT swap. Two different device
drivers may have completely different contents in all of the registers, CP
running or not, VRAM and AGP space. With two device drivers you have to
completely save state of the GPU, VRAM and AGP at VT swap in order to be safe.
don't know whether the imagination of a register-controlled graphics peripheral with hundrets of control registers is still valid for a fully programmable modern GPU.
I'd rather think of it like you think of a conventional SIMD-processor, a context switch between different shader programs looks probably more like a process context switch of a classic CPU than a VT switch of older graphics cards.
There's still a crap-ton more state than just which vertex/fragment programs are running. Even the vp/fp state is more than the traditional register file, stack pointer, IP, etc. I'm not even convinced that current GPUs allow the kind of "happy" task swapping that's being discussed. I very seriously doubt that you can halt and restart an in-progress shader. That would require extra logic, reduce performance, and wouldn't help games. What makes you think any of the current cards are designed to do this?
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