Yeah, no offense, but I don't think you fully understand the differences between the CPU/GPU.
The fact that you can get Linux running on a lower powered machine doesn't mean much when it comes to raw graphics horsepower. These resource "savings" are almost entirely on the CPU/RAM side. A software renderer would run just as poorly on a Linux machine as a Windows machine because a CPU is not designed for graphics processing, it's designed for serial, general purpose computing. The hardware graphics pipeline gets you matrix/vector computations, per-vertex lighting, view projection transformations, clipping and culling, scan conversion, texture lookups, and in modern hardware, vertex and fragment shader engines and geometry tessellation, all massively parallel in hardware. Even a low-range GPU can crank through graphics operations like a hot knife through butter compared to a high-range CPU. It's not a matter of having extra "resources". The point is that those extra "resources" won't get you very far compared to a hardware graphics pipeline, because they're not specialized. Modern CPUs run best when context switching is kept to a minimum, because they have huge cores that offer a lot of general purpose functionality. GPUs have (nowadays) hundreds of small, highly-specialized cores designed specifically for the operations in the graphics pipeline. There's not a whole lot consumers can do to get ATI to up their game on their Linux drivers, other than contact them and complain about driver support. Honestly the best thing that could happen right now to level the playing field is to have a major game publisher (anybody at Valve reading this? :D) announce Linux support, preferably with a "runs best on nVidia because their Linux drivers don't suck" campaign. Big companies like ATI don't respond to something until it bites them in their pocketbook. --Bob On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 1:48 AM, joshua simmons <simmons...@gmail.com> wrote: > You will never get any speed out of a software renderer, and using Linux > won't change that. > > I don't think you quite understand the fundamental differences between CPU > architecture and a massively parallel gpu architecture. > > On 18 Jun 2010 18:41, "Katrina Payne" <fullmetalhar...@nimhlabs.com> wrote: > > The idea of GPU is a method to take load off o the main CPU, to put it onto > another processor that has the only purpose of processing the graphics you > are > doing. > > A form of delegating between multiple chips, as I understood it. > > This way, you have one chip working specifically on the graphics, and the > other > doing everything else. > > And you are right---a software render cannot compete with a GPU on an even > field. > > You missed the point where Linux does not take up as much system resources, > typically, as the latest versions of Windows does. > > The idea being, to get a software renderer on Linux, to work on the same > level > as a hardware renderer on Windows. > > Like I said, you can typically get Linux, to run in a GBA... you cannot fit > anything else into there (maybe pong, I guess?). A GBA typically clocks in > at > about 67.5MHz IIRC, with next to no RAM. > > Windows 7, kind of requires 1GiB at a minimum for RAM, and you are going to > need at least 1 or 2 GHz to get it running. > > My idea, again, in case you missed it, was to try to take up this saved > overhead, use it for software rendering, to make it comparable to the > hardware > rendering on Windows. > > The idea being: > > If you can get that kind of comparable speed on Linux with Software > Rendering... this would make graphics card companies more inclined to make > drivers for Linux--as this shows how much more resources you can fit games > into. > > I mean, no idea how this point was lost, when what started this train of > thought was that Nvidia and ATI had issues supporting Linux with their > drivers. > > The software rendering engine would never be more than used as a form of > insane PoC idea. Or at least, never commercially. > > It would be a demo, that would be aimed at getting the attention of hardware > driver developers to target linux for these drivers. > > A publicity stunt was what I was suggesting. > > ~Katrina > > > On Tuesday, June 15, 2010 02:45:33 pm Adam Buckland wrote: >> I was under the impression that the wh... > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders > > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
