3D overlord [LWN.net]

3D overlord

Posted Dec 1, 2009 8:50 UTC (Tue) by kragil (subscriber, #34373)
In reply to: 3D overload by eru
Parent article: Between Fedora 12 and 13

Well, Compiz is not the real goal. Having fast smooth non-flickering non-tearing graphics and tapping into the power of the GPU is.
The GPU is a powerful friend for doing a lot of things.
On Windows IE and Firefox will render their web pages with the GPU which provides a lot of acceleration.

I'm not 100% sure, but couldn't almost all of things in X be done by the GPU? (Drawing, hinting, font rendering etc.) Wouldn't that be something?

And I grow quite tired of the memory consumption whining. If done right only the memory on the graphics card will be used and not having 512 mb gfx memory laying around dormant is only a good thing in my book.(Win7 already does it that way .. Vista didn't.)

@drag: Thankfully Windows XP support will be with us for years and years to come. Hell, it is still being sold. So before 2015 we don't have to worry that much. Linux is lucky in that regard, but that is just for the fairly broken status quo.

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3D overlord

Posted Dec 1, 2009 9:16 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

And I grow quite tired of the memory consumption whining. [...]

Actually, when writing about resources, I wasn't whining about memory consumption (this time... normally I whine about it a lot). What I meant is the extensive need of bright mind time to debug 3D support and (even worse) reverse-engineer proprietary 3D hardware and drivers for things like Nouveau.

But I guess I just have to stop worrying and learn to love 3D cards.

3D overlord

Posted Dec 1, 2009 17:11 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well don't worry to much about the concentration on '3D'. The GPU is really just a bunch of tiny processor cores, really. We (in Linux) can't use them for anything to substantial in distros because the proprietary software, well, is proprietary, and the open source stuff is not up to snuff yet. Think about it like a math co-processor in a 286 machine.

The 'fixed function' "OpenGL Accelerator" or "DirectX Accelerator" style graphics card which was designed to specifically acceleration one or two APIs started dying off with the introduction of things like 'Geforce 256'. Every since then they are growing more and more general purpose. The DDX and Mesa DRI drivers were designed specifically for that sort of 'fixed function' were you hand off certain OpenGL functions to hardware. This is one of the reasons that hardware support is so slow coming and it's so difficult to make them stable and useful.

The Geforce 256 was the first major step away from that sort of concept and it was introduced around mid-1999, which goes to show you how far behind Linux really is.

Nowadays they can be used for just about anything. Accelerating media decoding/encoding, (certain types of) super-fast floating point calculations for scientific calculations and stuff like that. Hell I expect that they could possibly be used for some sort of crypto or random number generation. The push for the '3D' desktop is partially just a vehicle for change. To get users to actually start caring and heavily use 3D stuff; especially open source drivers. The unified memory management and related items (KMS/DRI2/etc) are a basic dependency for Linux to take advantage of the power the GPU can unlock. Besides all that, of course, it will help with security since we can separate graphical users from root in a much more substantial way and it will help making the desktop more attractive due to the increase in performance, stability, and that sort of thing.