Summer of Code applicant with ambition!

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Stefan Dösinger
<stefandoesinger at gmx.at> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I think writing (yet another) D3D benchmark isn't going to help a lot, there
> are already numerous benchmarks out there.
>
> I have built a very hacky set of cxtest and php scripts that run a bunch of
> benchmarks and games(3DMark, Half Life 2, UT 2004, Team Fortress), store the
> results on a server and generate some graphs with gnuplot. Extending this and
> making it easier for others to run would be more useful than implementing
> another benchmark.
>
> If you want to get familiar with the D3D code writing tests is a good start.
> If you want to implement some small new functionality, maybe Nvidia's Depths
> Bound extension( NVDB, see http://aras-p.info/texts/D3D9GPUHacks.html ) might
> be a possible weekend project.
>
> Btw, the above webpage might have some other d3d9 "extensions" that are more
> work could be suitable for Gsoc projects, maybe DF16, DF24, INTZ, RAWZ, NULL
> and ATOC.
>
> Optimizing wined3d is certainly an idea as well, but it's not an easy task.
> We're beyond the point where you can get reasonable performance gains from
> simply fixing a loop or two. Some performance issues are known bugs(sRGB
> switching, sRGB write correction in HW, thread synchronization), others
> require tedious debugging to find out what specific 3D drivers don't like about
> our GL calls.
>

Perhaps the long talked about fixed function vertex shader replacement
could be an option though. It would fix vertex blending but it might
also improve performance (some people were complaining about poor GL
T&L performance http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=7975). Further
it might be more efficient for modern drivers anyway, especially open
source DRI ones since they are mostly investing in shaders.

Roderick