[ILUG] Future of Mesa ?

[Martin Donlon]

Mesa has been supporting 3dfx cards for the past two or three years. Don't
really see what nvidia are blabing about:/

Long live the confused,
                  Akawaka.
--
Bother! Said Pooh, and twitted his moderator.

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, John P. Looney wrote:

> > If you check www.nvidia.com/News.nsf they also
> > have an announcement of cooperating with SGI and VA Linux to bring out the
> > first hardware accelerated OpenGL implementation for Linux.  Nobody seems to
> > be really sure what to do with Mesa, read the comments on the article on
> > slashdot.org
>  
>  Hmm. They seem to be jumping the boat. Xig have had a hardware
> accelerated OpenGL out for a fair while, and MetroX have been shipping an
> X server & OpenGL implementation for about five years. Proper, tested &
> SGI badged OpenGL at that.
> 
> > >    Mesa is still a very good software implementation.  Its great for those
> > >    who want to see how things like rendering on the fly is done in software...
> > Nobody wants to see any form of 3D done in software anymore, the fact that
> > just about every graphics card manufactured in recent years has hardware 3d
> > acceleration might indicate that.
> 
>  Indeed. I was of the idea that Mesa formed the backend of the OpenGL/
> XFree86 4.0 implementation. That's why Brian Paul got the job with
> Precision Insight, yeah ? It's all a bit mad. Imagine the grief that could
> have been saved had SGI open sourced OpenGL five years ago. Mesa wouldn't
> have had to be written. Gamers could have bundled OpenGL libraries with
> their games. Direct3D wouldn't have got off the ground.