Driver-supported DirectX

[King InuYasha]

The problem with all that is that DirectX is tightly integrated into
Windows-specific components, and therefore the only level that it could
exist is along the rest of the Wine layer. I also wish to note that AMD
isn't releasing radeon drivers, they had Novell develop a WHOLE NEW driver
for the ATI cards. Really the best way to deal with issues with DirectX and
OpenGL is to add extensions to OpenGL to expose the functionality in the
hardware that can be translated to DX calls. In Linux, I suppose this
wouldn't be a big issue since the Mesa stuff could be modified to expose the
functionality missing. If Wine can take advantage of compiz or AIGLX
functionality, then that is wonderful. AFAIK, Wine does not utilize compiz
or AIGLX functionality, rather it goes straight to Mesa? I am not a
programmer, so I don't really know.

On Nov 23, 2007 2:51 AM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 23/11/2007, Remco <remco47 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I don't know the first thing about driver- and DirectX-programming, so
> please forgive (and point out) any mistakes.
> >
> > As a reader of this list I'm wondering; there are quite a few problems
> that come from the fact that DirectX isn't 1:1 translatable to OpenGL. How
> about talking to some guys from the GPU-driver department about creating a
> driver-interface that gives you the right hooks. I guess Parallels and
> Transgaming would also be interested in such a development. I can imagine
> that the Nouveau-devs and Xorg-radeon-devs would be more than happy to
> listen.
>
> This sounds interesting.
>
> It may be useful contacting the nouveau (open source NVidia 3D driver
> reverse engineering project) development team to see if they can add
> OpenGL extensions for DirectX functionality.
>
> Intel have official open source drivers for Linux, so it would be
> useful contacting their developers as well.
>
> Also, with the AMD merger, the radeon drivers are being released as
> open source. There are also the reverse engineered radeon drivers, so
> they might be interested. And with the graphics card specs being
> published, this might make it easier to do this.
>
> > This goes beyond the scope of the Wine project I think. But since Wine
> > has the higher level part of DirectX documented and implemented on top
> > of OpenGL, wouldn't this be the place to start an independent library?
> > Codeweavers has a lot of knowledge about Windows, DirectX and Linux.
> > Only Microsoft itself would be a better choice, but I don't think they
> > really care that much about Linux. ;)
> >
> > This would mean that DirectX would be as native to Linux and OSX (and
> friends) as it would be for Windows. It would be an actual reliable platform
> that could be used by game developers. It would de-Windows-ize DirectX.
> Maybe NVIDIA, ATI and Intel would also be interested. They could sell their
> expensive next-gen cards to those 5% that don't run Windows if games would
> actually be released for non-Windows OSes.
> >
> > Or are there really compelling technical reasons to wrap around OpenGL?
> I can think of the Compiz-issue. Similarly, Microsoft stated that they have
> to wrap OpenGL around DirectX on Windows, to be able to use both OpenGL and
> DirectX at the same time (for Aero). But I suspect that this implementation
> just developed naturally because messing with the drivers would be
> unthinkable way back when.
>
> It is only Windows applications that use DirectX. All of the Linux
> infrastructure (Xgl, Compiz, etc.) is built around OpenGL. Therefore,
> for Wine to integrate into the Linux desktop infrastructure, DirectX
> needs to map onto OpenGL.
>
> I would say that the best approach would be cooperating with the
> nouveau, Intel and Radeon Linux graphics driver developers to add the
> extensions needed to support DirectX. The Intel and Radeon developers
> would be useful to have on board, as they might be able to give
> information on how they are implementing DirectX: this will allow us
> to cooperate with the Linux driver teams to get the OpenGL extensions
> needed.
>
> As for the nouveau team, it would be interesting to get the renouveau
> reverse engineering driver running on Windows to reverse engineer the
> DirectX driver and develop the corresponding OpenGL extensions.
>
> - Reece
>
>
>
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