On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 09:30:50AM -0800, Ian Romanick wrote: > Sven Luther wrote: > >On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 05:33:42PM -0800, Ian Romanick wrote: > > > >>1. Single-copy textures > >> > >>Right now each texture exists in two or three places. There is a copy > >>in on-card or AGP memory, in system memory (managed by the driver), and > >>in application memory. Any solution should be able to eliminate one or > >>two of those copies. > > > >... > > > >BTW, since you are looking into this, have you thought about graphic > >chips which can do MMU like tricks. I am not sure if the current set of > >graphic chips the DRI runs on do this kind of stuff, but they well may > >in the future. I know the gamma drm module use the gamma's virtual > >memory table to not need to do virtual<->physical conversion. But more > >importantly to you, altough there is not yet a DRI driver for it, the > >3Dlabs permedia3 can use virtual memory for its textures. That is you > >can basically set up the graphic boards memory as a cache memory, and > >have the the MMU-like unit swap the memory pages from host memory, using > >i suppose its own page replacement algorithm. > > The only chips that I know of that support this technology are the > various, recent 3dlabs chips. They have a number of patents on this > technology, and, AFAIK, they have no intention of licensing it to anyone > for all the tea in China.
Well, sure ... But that is not reason for not supporting it or something, who knows, Creative and 3Dlabs may release a consumer board supporting those next year, and there will be lot of those around. And you don't think other manufacturer may develop their own technology doing this ? virtual memory is hardly that inovative that a patent can block ATI or NVidia from developping a similar issue, after all it is used since years in CPUs. > I agree that it is a good idea to keep virtual textures in mind, but, > since we don't have any hardware documentation for it, it will be > difficult to do more than that. Mmm, i know of at least 3 persons who have the docs for the pm3 apart from me, sure, you need to sign an NDA, but who does not these days, i also have the hardware for it, and am planning to do DRI work for those in the future, and one of those 3 persons has expressed interrest on having DRI enabled for the pm3, and i did begin some work for the gamma + pm3 combo. That said, sure, there is not really all that much i can contribute to this discution, since i am under NDA, but, well, virtual memory for graphic chips work all the same as virtual memory for CPUs so i guess it is easy to take those things into account also. > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.NET email is sponsored by: FREE SSL Guide from Thawte > are you planning your Web Server Security? Click here to get a FREE > Thawte SSL guide and find the answers to all your SSL security issues. > http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?thaw0026en > _______________________________________________ > Dri-devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: FREE SSL Guide from Thawte are you planning your Web Server Security? Click here to get a FREE Thawte SSL guide and find the answers to all your SSL security issues. http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?thaw0026en _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
