From: Ove K. <ov...@tr...> - 2003-08-04 16:58:27
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(Resent because of suspicions that sourceforge is dropping mail from my other account) >From recent discussion on the list, it is my understanding that some DRI drivers that implement (or will implement) EXT_texture_env_combine will have numerous software fallbacks. Is it possible to add a way for applications to detect when a texture environment will cause a software fallback? Direct3D has a mechanism called "ValidateDevice" for this purpose; you set up an environment and call ValidateDevice to see if the hardware can do it without fallbacks. Currently the only way I see to know such cases with DRI would be to use glGetString with GL_VENDOR and GL_RENDERER and have a table of hardware capabilities in every application that really need to know this, which is not very flexible and is hard to update when DRI gets new drivers and old drivers get new features. And I hear some Linux games already have to do this. Seems to me that a driver query would be a much better solution. Would it be feasible to implement such a mechanism? (Of course, there are other things that could cause a fallback (e.g. stippling), but that's a smaller problem.) |