[IDEA] integrate GPU so-called "softmods"

[forart.it]

PREAMBLE: if i’m saying something wrong or already implemented, please consider that I’m not a developer…

As many of you already knows, GPU manufacturers have unique production lines for PRO and CONSUMER chips.

This means that consumer chips can be exploited a little more than the official specifications.

For example i’ve got an IBM ThinkPad T42 (that runs Haiku quite well) with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 card; since it shares the same core (RV200 / M7) with FireGL 7800, according to <a href=http://www.aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=7444>this guide i could enable OpenGL drivers with interesting results:

BEFORE

AFTER

Wikipedia confirm this too @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_FireGL#Soft-mods

Because of the similarities between FireGL and Radeon cards, some users soft-mod their Radeon cards by using third-party software or automated scripts accompanied with a modified FireGL driver patch, to enable FireGL capabilities for their hardware, effectively getting a cheaper, equivalent, FireGL cards, often with better OpenGL capabilities, but usually half of the amount of video memory. Some variants can also be soft-modded to a FireStream stream processor.

Performance comparison videos:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/Arvydazas/videos?view=0&flow=grid

Other:

• http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=227800
• http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=313065

I honestly don’t know if Haiku already implement this in his ATI driverset, but it could be very interesting IMHO.

Hope that help or at least inspires !

Marco Ravich

[foobear]

Well, the forum entry you linked to was really TLDR, but if I got the first part right, this is about installing a newer version of the proprietary ATI/AMD graphics driver on Windows, because the older ones that officially support your hardware are buggy.

I fail to see how any of this is somehow relevant to Haiku. Plus Haiku doesn’t even have hardware accelerated graphics drivers yet, not for AMD nor any other card. And even if it will, they will be the Gallium drivers, which are not at all related to the proprietary ones.

[cb88]

Mesa for instance probably aleady renders Oolite correctly on just about any card (on Linux… but probably will end up with similar results on Haiku) it isn’t a taxing game very low polys even less than Minecraft which runs playably on my CPU at this point O.o!

The 7500 only supports opengl 1.4 so…it isn’t likely to ever have a gallium3d driver either