AW: Shameless call for game testing

Stefan Dösinger stefandoesinger at gmx.at
Thu Jun 25 06:35:37 CDT 2009


Am Thursday 25 June 2009 11:45:19 schrieb Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com:
> Stefan,
>
> >Generally, turning off GLSL turns down the advertised shader
> >model to 1.x, which is the d3d8 feature set.
>
> Is this still the case since your mail
> http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-June/076766.html
No - it is 2.0 now, or even 3.0 with the NV extensions. However, if the 
hardware supports less than 256 vertex shader constants, we still advertise 
SM 1.x. That is usually the case on HW that does not support more than SM 1.x 
anyway. If we advertised SM 2.0 on these cards, many shaders would very 
likely fall back to software rendering.

> Does the Intel i915 qualify? How do I tell? How is this related to Mesa?
> Would it require a Mesa much newer than Ubuntu 8.10 (yeah, I know 9.04 is
> around)?
In theory SM 2.0 with ARB. Mesa drivers are generally in a bad shape, 
especially the ones that are shipped by ubuntu, so many games are expected to 
fail. Shaders are just a small part of the equation.

This ARB works helps Mesa insofar because it gives somewhat decent shader 
support without requiring a GLSL compiler. A GLSL compiler has to be pretty 
darn good to work properly with Wine, so before Gallium3D is stable and in 
use, I don't expect GLSL to work well in complex games with open source 
drivers.

I talked to some Mesa developers on #winehackers, they might introduce their 
own ATI/Intel/Mesa specific extensions for SM 3.0 support on top of ARB 
shaders. Ie, a subset of the NV extensions that ATI cards support. (Nvidia HW 
supports more things than D3D makes available, and ATI cards can't support 
the full NV asm extensions)



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