[openbeos] Re: Jason Samms, unreleased OpenGL

>
>Michael Phipps wrote:
>
>>As far as OpenGL, porting Mesa sounds like a great idea.
>>Honestly, OpenGL is the one area of BeOS that scares me.
>>Not so much the software render side, but the "real", hardware accelerated
>>stuff. Everyone that I have ever spoken to who should know says that 
>>Jason Samms is a *great* engineer. And that HWOGL is not really even 
>>near done. And that most mere mortals will struggle to understand it.
>
>My sense (from what I read on the user sites, and from knowing a 
>couple of the right people) is that the new OpenGL kit was pretty 
>complete. Jason did his job extraordinarily wel--what was missing was 
>a wide variety of hardware drivers. Or am I missing something?

I have been lead to understand that it is not really done yet.
What works is awesome, but it is not all there yet. So I have been told.

>I do agree with you that OpenGL deserves its reputation (N.B. I have 
>no direct experience with it...I haven't done any coding in years.) 
>In particular, drivers aren't easy to write. Note Leo Schwab's 
>experience fighting with the 810 drivers, which I've heard him 
>describe in a couple forums...in theory, you'd expect reference 
>boards and documentation from a company at Intel's scale to be good, 
>and it <cough> wasn't a good experience.

I am not surprised. Intel wrote the drivers for 810 for Windows. What
other drivers would you need? Why document it well? :-)

>It would be cool to hear from either Leo or Jason, or maybe even some 
>other ex-Be types like JBQ and Andrew Kimpton, weighing the design 
>tradeoffs of going with MESA or going with a replacement OpenGL kit.

I would love to have a HWOGL fall into my lap. :-) 
I don't think (and this is my opinion only) that we should put bare minimum work
into a software OGL renderer. Basically, they are worthless, since most opengl
is for games, and no one wants 1fps games. 

>Who knows, maybe they're lurking, like I was. (Sorry to go </lurk> on 
>y'all, but I wanted to grab Jason's OpenGL back while I had a chance, 
>and then I couldn't resist the unwise temptation to keep typing.)
>
>Cheers,
>Jim
>
>

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