Re: [Mesa3d-dev] rasterize or rendering?

[Keith W. <ke...@va...>]

rt wrote:
> 
>         what about specialized hardware that performs the rendering based
> on a final list of vertices? how can a hardware driver deal with this
> situation? do hardware drivers operate on lists of vertices?
> 

This handled by overriding the decomposition to triangles at one of two
levels.

The render stage is parameterized with a table of functions which handle whole
begin/end objects.  In mesa 3.5 these are called ctx->Driver.RenderTabXYZ. 
These are called for unclipped primitives only.  You can override these to
just emit vertices directly. 

The drivers we have don't do this.  Instead they take a seperate approach of
overriding the whole render stage.  In the mesa-3-5 branch on dri cvs, the
i810 and radeon drivers implement a specialized render stage that emits strips
and other primitives directly to hardware in strip (or whatever) order.  This
is probably closest to what you are looking for.

Keith