Re: [Celestia-developers] Eliminating the NV combiners render path

[Chris L. <cl...@gm...>]

It's possible that there are some laptop users stuck with extremely
old drivers from their manufacturers. I don't know of any specific
examples, though. And I'm prepared to let them lose their bump mapped
planets for the sake of progress ;)

--Chris

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 3:54 AM, Selden E Ball Jr
<se...@le...> wrote:
> What about embedded chipsets?
> Were there any of that vintage?
> Wouldn't people with them be locked into ancient drivers provided
> only by the manufacturers of their computers?
>
> It probably would still be appropriate to drop support,
> but I think it'd be appropriate to make a very public
> announcement that it's going to happen.
>
> s.
>
>> I'd really like to go ahead and eliminate the NVIDIA combiners render
>> path. I'm not talking about removing NVIDIA combiner support
>> completely--I'm only interested in getting rid of the combiners
>> without OpenGL vertex program support. All current NVIDIA OpenGL
>> drivers at least offer software support for vertex programs, and
>> hardware support exists for all GeForce 3 and later cards. The only
>> people this would affect are users with both:
>
>> - A GeForce 256 or GeForce 2 graphics card
>> - An ancient (probably pre-2003) driver
>
>> Should we remove the combiners only path, these users would find that
>> planets are no longer rendered with bump mapping. To fix this, they
>> would simply need to update to post-Industrial Revolution drivers.
>
>> Continuing to support the combiners only path is becoming a burden.
>> It's difficult to test because it's automatically skipped (when
>> cycling with Ctrl+V) when vertex programs are available. I'd be
>> surprised if anyone here on the developers list had used the
>> combiners-only path any time in the last 4 years. In fact, it's quite
>> possible that renderer changes made within the last year have already
>> completely broken the combiners-only path.
>
>> Can anyone think of a reason to keep this old code around?
>
>> --Chris
>
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