Hi Terry, all,
In short,
good luck understanding the insane mess that is graphics drivers. It's
all very random.
It's only random if you try to understand it with a few limited
tests.... :-)
Someone has applied structured testing to the problem and has come up
with this:
http://www.g-truc.net/post-0538.html#menu
This is the "OpenGL driver status" posts, which Christophe Riccio posts
every month. He gathers this information using his own very
comprehensive OpenGL tests, which cover about every type of
functionality you would want to use in a very structured way. So he can
say with absolute certainty that a given driver will work with a given
usage pattern. (I wish this were used as a base for official Desktop
OpenGL conformance tests and that the results of these tests were
publicised by Khronos, so that vendors would have a real reason to keep
their drivers up to a certain level of quality... But I digress)
Then you just have to know your own app enough to know what it's doing
at the OpenGL level... Which is often the hard part :-) Tools like
gDEBugger (discontinued) or apitrace (active) can help there.
The only thing I find a pity is that he doesn't keep an easy to search
list of older drivers too. If he did, you could easily see that a given
feature worked starting with this version, broke in this one and then
was fixed in this one, and you could tell that to your clients, knowing
which features are critical to your application. You could even
automatically enable and disable features in your app by knowing which
driver versions they would work on. But maybe that's going too far...
Anyways, it's a useful resource I think.
J-S
--
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay jean_...@videotron.ca
http://whitestar02.dyndns-web.com/
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