Opengl vs mesa drivers

[sandeep_kumar]

hi ,

I am trying to set up the hardware accelerated mesa ? Is it possible ? As i have seen few tutorial to install mesa but i want to know whether mesa actually requires drivers to GPU as it is a software implementation of Opengl ? if not required then can it be implemented without GPU also ? ? ? ?

Please dont give the option of choosing Opengl itself… :eek:

[kRogue]

For Linux platform (and I suppose some other Unix’s), the default installation usually has that GL is given via Mesa. Mesa itself may or may not be hardware accelerated, depending on the version of Mesa and hardware in question. Generally speaking Mesa, provides OpenGL 2.1 with some extensions that are core in OpenGL 3.

Please dont give the option of choosing Opengl itself…

Just to be clear, Mesa is an implementation of the OpenGL API. Mesa provides a libGL.so (and potentially a libGLESv2.so). I think what you are trying to say is that you do not want to use a closed source GL implementation (for example NVIDIA’s closed source drivers and/or ATI Catalyst drivers).

Getting Mesa to work on MS-Windows… can be a real pain…

As a side note, generally speaking the closed source GL implementations provide more features and are a LOT faster… Mesa lacks the infrastructure to “have” all of OpenGL 3.x and for that matter 4.x, regardless of how modern the hardware is.