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Re: Cairo rendering backend

 

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 10:27:19PM +0100, Maciej Sumiński wrote:
> I have never said that it only works with nVidia or ATI (I would rather
> suspect that ATI could make issues) - I have an integrated Intel GPU in my
> notebook and it works fine.

Seems to work fine even with my pc. From the specs it uses the G33 so
it's a GMA3100 (AFAIK it's i915-class)... wikipedia says 'Shader Model
3.0, support Pixel Shader 2.0 and doesn't support Vertex Shader with
OpenGL 1.4 support.' 

> To use vertex buffer objects, that drastically increase the performance, you
> need to support at least OpenGL 1.5. The other extension that is used are

Really? AFAIK there were alse before that... but probably as different
extensions with another name...

> framebuffer objects. In the specification it says that it requires OpenGL,
> but somehow Intel Atom GPUs that are said to support OpenGL up to version
> 1.4 lack that feature..

Given that most OpenGL features are optional (or, better, acceleration
is optional... the old FireGL4 had absolutely wonderful hardware
antialiasing but no fog!) it doesn't seem too strange that support is
patchy.  Probably the FBO issue could be fixed with drivers, I don't
think there would be special HW needed for them. In fact the Pineview
Atoms use the GMA3150 so unless there are memory constraints (since they
share from the main core) if it works on my 3100 it should work on
Atoms, too...

Here
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerator-3150.23264.0.html
says it's OpenGL 1.5.

Other than that *if* there will be need some of these feature have
equivalent old extensions which more or less the same capabilities (IIRC
before FBOs there were pBuffers), to be coded in the relevant part of
the GAL; I agree that should be a last resort, only if heavily
requested (also: there will be a need for guinea pigs for testing these:P)

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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