On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 18:58:58 -0800 "mark cass" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> felix, > > i have been watching the dri development forum for a while. as you seem to be the > person spearheading the savage 3d driver effort, i have directed this message to > you. > > I am interested in this driver because the company i work for uses it on an embedded > target. we do not use a powerful processor so every bit of performance we can get > out of the video driver is important. I have been involved in software engineer for > the past ten years. most of the work was done on a proprietary platform. the last > two years have been on linux. i have studied the dri documentation and source code > and now i would like to write some code. Sounds like someone is going to pay a developer for improving the free driver. That's great. It can only help improve the driver more quickly. I just hope I'll be able to keep up with the pace. ;-) > > the areas that i would like to look at first are clipping and the texture > compression extension. are these difficult projects? can you point me in the right > direction? The DRI 3D drivers are based on Mesa. I'm assuming you know about Mesa. Clipping and all other transformations, software lighting and so on are done by the tnl-component of Mesa. This code is not specific to the savage driver. If you want to improve the performance of that code I suggest you contact the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list. Another thing that could use help is on-the-fly code generation for the new vertex setup code in t_vertex.[ch]. Keith Whitwell could tell you more about it. Currently only i830 and savage (AFAIK) use that code, but other drivers are expected to be ported to it sooner or later. As for the texture compression stuff, I have never tried it myself. Roland Scheidegger has been working on this for the Radeon and r200 drivers. He can probably give you more information about what is needed and how it works. I'm not sure how much work it would take to integrate this into the savage driver. You'd at least have to modify savageChooseTextureFormat and write the texture tiling and upload code for it. The current code is only tested for non-compressed textures. > > i would also imagine that i will need to get documentation concerning the hardware. > if you could pass along a contact i will get the ball rolling. our company buys > large quantities of these chipsets so it shouldn't be any problem to get the > documents, providing the right paper work is in order. We're working without official specs from S3. What we have as documentation is the 3D driver that S3 released as a code drop. This is the code that the savage 3D driver is based on. There is also a free driver for Savage3D-based chips in the Utah-GLX project. This has been used as "documentation" for adding Savage3D/MX/IX support to our driver. If you can get official documentation for the Savage4/Twister/ProSavage/whatever that would be great. Then we'd have someone who could verify if our guesses and reverse engineering are consistent with the specs. ;-) > > thanks, > mark Regards, Felix ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
