Is Mesa 3d hardware excelerated? Are the drivers from ATI and nVidia complete hardware excelerated replacements for mesa3d?
Originally posted by reubenhwk:
Is Mesa 3d hardware excelerated? Are the drivers from ATI and nVidia complete hardware excelerated replacements for mesa3d?
Mesa could take proffit from some acceleration (most common ones I think). But most of them will be only software implemented as it depends from card constructors.
I could only answer right for Nvidia. Their drivers are not free drivers. This is the first point. However, they are fast, hw accelerated of course, and provide the gl development files.
Ati seems to provide a same way as Nvidia, but I’ve never really find something really full about it. I was hoping something similar than Nvidia or better full DRI support with Mesa and hw acceleration, but this does not seem this is the case.
Mesa itself is SW only except for 3dfx cards and posibly a few others (very old mostly). The DRI implements HW accel. backends which use mesa for some parts that don’t have much to do with gfx hw (like checking paramters passed to commands etc.) and for a sw fallback. So you shouldn’t generally use mesa itself but the dri . AFAIK nvidia is the only manufacturer which doesn’t use the dri but implements it’s own driver including glx etc. ATI uses the DRI I think.
What versions of OpenGL do the ATI, nVidia and Mesa3d drivers implement?
[This message has been edited by reubenhwk (edited 03-16-2004).]
Originally posted by reubenhwk:
[b]What versions of OpenGL do the ATI, nVidia and Mesa3d drivers implement?
[This message has been edited by reubenhwk (edited 03-16-2004).][/b]
I’d very like to know for ATI in fact.
Nvidia supports Opengl 1.4 actually (as reported by glxinfo).
Mesa should be 1.4 too, however I’m not really certain about this.
NVIDIA 53.36 reports version 1.4.1, about ATI I’m not sure. Both of these cards though support most of the features of 1.5, they probably can’t claim 1.5 support because they do not implement 100% of the 1.5 spec. The latest version of Mesa (6) supports 1.5.
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