Around 18 o'clock on May 27, Keith Whitwell wrote:
> I think the multiplayer aspects of the game are a separate issue. Talking > about the difference between a big display list with the whole quake level in > it and the visibility/bsp-tree/whatever-new-technique coding that quake & > other games use to squeeze as much as possible out of the hardware. We had a big display-list vs immediate-mode war around 1990 and immediate mode won. It's just a lot easier to send the whole frame worth of polygons each time than to try an edit display lists. Of course, this particular battle was framed by the "scientific visualization" trend of that era where each frame was generated from a completely new set of data. In that context, stored mode graphics lose pretty badly. However, given our experience with shared memory transport for images, and given the tremendous differential between CPU and bus speeds these days, it might make some sense to revisit the current 3D architecture. A system where the shared memory commands are validated by a user-level X server and passed to the graphics engine with only a small kernel level helper for DMA would allow for a greater possible level of security than the current DRI model does today. This would also provide for accelerated 3D graphics for remote applications, something that DRI doesn't support today, and which would take some significant work to enable. I would hope that it could also provide a significantly easier configuration environment; getting 3D running with the DRI is still a significant feat for the average Linux user. The question is whether this would impact performance at all; we're talking a process<->process context switch instead of process<->kernel for each chunk of data. However, we'd eliminate the current DRI overhead when running multiple 3D applications, and we'd be able to take better advantage of SMP systems. One trick would be to have the X server avoid reading much of the command buffer; much of that would make SMP performance significantly worse. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team HP Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
