On 04/12/2011 09:12 AM, Adam Jackson wrote:
There are two major package classes in Fedora that provide graphics
drivers: xorg-x11-drv-*, and mesa-dri-drivers-*.
In F15, mesa-dri-drivers now only includes drivers with DRI2 support
(radeon, nvidia, intel) and the software renderer; if you want all the
older drivers you have to install mesa-dri-drivers-dri1. This list is:
i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, unichrome
Basically all of this hardware is, ahem, inept. The most featureful
device supported by these drivers would be the MGA G550, which just
barely manages to do DirectX 7 (comparable to a Radeon 7000 or GeForce
2, both ~1999 vintage). All the others are back in the DX6 stone age.
My r128 card (Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2X; pci 1002:4c46) is running
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) on Windows ME. The main driver ATI2DRAI.DRV
says "DDI Version 7". The machine also runs Fedora 12 using:
xorg-x11-server-Xorg.1.7.6-4.fc12.i686
xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.13.0-0.21.20100219gite68d3a389.fc12.i686
xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.8.1-2.fc12.i686
Such a machine is quite usable.
For comparison, the baseline for the GPU in the phone in your pocket
-
and that platform layers like clutter more or less expect - is GLES 2.0,
which is roughly comparable to DirectX 9. We're rapidly approaching the
point where the software renderer is going to be a more satisfying
experience than hardware 3d support for these chips, both for features
and for performance.
How rapidly? Today, which one leads in "satisfying experience", and by how
much?
[snip]
So in my ideal world, we would simply drop the -dri1 subpackage (and for
that matter, DRI1 support in the X server).
Such a wish would be better justified by statistics on usage
(smolt, at least) and support effort (size and rate of change in
source commits, number of maintainers with relevant experience, ...)
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