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.