Haikunews has coverage of Rudolf Cornellisen’s latest update on his blog about his work on hardware OpenGL for nVidia cards on BeOS. Actual acceleration on GeForce cards is now working at a speed 2x-3x that of what software acceleration was capable of.
Real Hardware OpenGL Under BeOS
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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ATI cards (up to and including the r200 generation) are supported by Direct Rendering in Mesa. Intel cards, 3Dfx cards, Matrox cards, as well. r300 Radeon cards are somewhat supported in a separate CVS tree. It seems that getting the DRI working on BeOS would make more sense, and probably be a whole lot easier…
i thought eugenia said it was gonna take like 3 or 4 years for haiku to show up
Well, in Eugenia’s defense, it was a while since she said that, thjayo. And even though the progress is impressive and I’m sure they’ll get there in the end, it’s going to take a while before a fully featured “pure” Haiku system is here. Of course most of the work is usable today, as the bulk of it can be slotted into good old R5.
http://bitsofnews.com
That might be fact, but many also tend to make the mistake that development pace is constant. I’m confident that the very day Haiku makes a successful boot into a GUI and is actually somewhat usable, a strange thing will happen to the other alternative OSs communities. Like a lot of people will migrate to Haiku and commitment pace will increase rapidly. Ofcourse this is all speculation but I sort of think that people has grown less of Linux complexity and trickyness as well as realised that most of the *Nix sort of things are probably better off for servers and that they might want something a little more lightweight for their desktops.
I really think Haiku is bang on target and that the developer numbers will increase in vast numbers soon (as in this superboot=) )
Ofcourse this is all speculation but I sort of think that people has grown less of Linux complexity and trickyness as well as realised that most of the *Nix sort of things are probably better off for servers and that they might want something a little more lightweight for their desktops.
Don’t be to certain about that. BeOS was a technical marvel and Haiku will be a technical marvel, but don’t discount the progress being made on desktop *Nix as we speak.
X.org is right on track for some stunning eye-candy capabilities….
Once Haiku is complete enough to deliver a fast media desktop, I’ll reserve a some harddrive space for it though.
Did someone say candy?
http://haiku.mlotz.ch/haiku-app_server04.png
Stuff is coming along real nicely. Nay sayers are in for plenty of hat-eating along the road 🙂
Prog.
Now that screenshot is a thing of beauty!
don’t discount the progress being made on desktop *Nix as we speak.
yes, that’s what I’ve heard for the past 6 years… I believe it when I see it…
don’t discount the progress being made on desktop *Nix as we speak.
yes, that’s what I’ve heard for the past 6 years… I believe it when I see it…
Mac OS X is a desktop *NIX, and I love every second I am using it. Just because it doesn’t use KDE or GNOME as its WM doesn’t exclude it from being a desktop *NIX.
KDE or Gnome compared to BeOS are gobstoppers, not just small candies.
At least if one is interested in being absolutely accurate, it’s an implementation of an updated Open Step environment running as a service on microkernel alongside a *NIX service.
THis is awsome, but I’d still like to see the full screen issues resovled. I recall BeOS did not like full screen one bit and about everything had to be run in a window.
Thats odd, I could have sworn I just closed a fullscreen session of Quake II on my R5 desktop, and I now have VLC fullscreened…
R3 era, full screen didn’t work very well. Was fixed *years* ago.
Rudolf’s been busy – a quote from his blog:
” Wow!!! I will be playing around for a while before I report back!! 8-))))”
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/be-hold/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html
BeOS doesn’t like fuulscreen ???
I have here at home a PIII 600mhz with 256DDR and a GeForce MX 200 32 Mo and i now use it since 3 months with Zeta Neo only to encode music in mp3, watch Divx and browsing web
(my xp laptop is no longer connected to internet)
Just try to run a Divx on this configuration with OS X or Windows Xp
Since Haiku boot from the hard drive to kernel, a lot of devs are coming to help. It’s just a first sign but since they have a graphical something to show (even if it’s a “5 minutes n’ crash” experience nowdays), some devs are putinng their project on the side and join the haiku team.
Thanks god Stephan Asmus (Wonderbrush) is one of those !
I really think that Haiku will soon (1 or 2 years) make some real noise in the opensource and OS community.
But also, it will clearly stay a geek OS until R2 or 3.
“in 2 or 3 years, Windows and OS X will be a lot better than what they are today”.
Oh, perhaps you are talking about this TCPA and Palladium things that will force home users to switch from Windows cause they will not ever buy a Photoshop license, or this all OS integrated filters of OS X, that even Adobe is not using for their new CS 2 suite …
The OS market is not established !!!! (see what s happening with web browsers !)
Read about the open graphics card.
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9003
“I have here at home a PIII 600mhz with 256DDR and a GeForce MX 200 32 Mo and i now use it since 3 months with Zeta Neo only to encode music in mp3, watch Divx and browsing web
(my xp laptop is no longer connected to internet)
Just try to run a Divx on this configuration with OS X or Windows Xp”
Ok, but first find me a P3 motherboard that actually supports DDR memory. You must mean SDR.
Ok, but first find me a P3 motherboard that actually supports DDR memory. You must mean SDR.
—————————————————–
Sadly they did exist I infact sold one. It was quite an odd beast. Dual p3 (socket 370) MSI VIA. In fact here is the link
http://www.surfcomputers.com/products/mainboard/ms9105.htm
I remember playing Quake 2 (in software mode) full screen with NO problems. Quake 1 would crash, pRBOOM just ran like crap and did not like full screen. Worms would only play in a windows, I think Abuse only ran in a window…
…I dunno I could have swore there were problems.
Speaking of Quake 2, where did all the MODs on bebits for it goto?!??! Dead links. :/
In any regard, once this new copy of Zeta is out, I’m sure I’ll be back to use Be, after all it is the BEST OS I’ve EVER used, I just could not stand the bugs in 5.3.
I must admit I’ve got a bit lost down the blog. What exactly needs to be exchanged in order to make Q2 or Teapot run using HW 3D accel.? Rudolf talks about driver hooks for lines, triangles etc. but there is talk about Mesa buffers for Quake… where exactly is this driver plugged into? Will it be possible to take advantage of it simply by using OpenGL Kit or will be a special library neccessary?
BeOS is fighting very hard for a “dead” OS … 3D Hard…
🙂
A new version?? You must mean 5.03
> I must admit I’ve got a bit lost down the blog.
> What exactly needs to be exchanged in order to make Q2
> or Teapot run using HW 3D accel.?
libGL.so. That’s the name of the OpenGL library used by GLTeapot, Q2, etc. These programs don’t care how the rendering is done in fact.
Be provide with R5 and sooner a libGL.so implementing OpenGL 1.2 API and a (SGI-licensed) software renderer builtin.
The current Mesa 6.x port for BeOS offer quite the same, but slighty more up-to-date
– a libGL.so implementing OpenGL, but updated to support 1.5 API (2.0 should comes asap Mesa will support it…)
– a Mesa-powered software renderer builtin
– a libglut.so implementing GLUT recent API.
The next step on which Rudolf (and, on a far smaller scale, I) works is to move to Hardware-powered renderers, starting with NVidia support.
> Rudolf talks about driver hooks for lines, triangles etc. > but there is talk about Mesa buffers for Quake… where > exactly is this driver plugged into?
Behind libGL.so.
In fact, Rudolf forked the libGL.so generated by Mesa 3.2 BeOS port and tweak it to add builtin hardware acceleration for NVidia cards. That’s a proof of concept at time.
Next step is to move renderers (software, hardware accelerated, debugger purpose ones) into add-ons loaded by libGL.so. It’s still transparent for applications.
> Will it be possible to take advantage of it simply by
> using OpenGL Kit or will be a special library neccessary?
Simply by using OpenGL Kit (or GLUT API also available separatly or included in latest Mesa BeOS port).
Rudolf run his benchmarks on unmodified GLTeapot app. Just replacing the out-of-box libGL.so by his own, NVidia accelerated, version.
[i]Behind libGL.so.
In fact, Rudolf forked the libGL.so generated by Mesa 3.2 BeOS port and tweak it to add builtin hardware acceleration for NVidia cards. That’s a proof of concept at time.
Next step is to move renderers (software, hardware accelerated, debugger purpose ones) into add-ons loaded by libGL.so. It’s still transparent for applications.
Aah!
This is what I wanted to know – Thanks! Good to hear this HW accel thing looks pretty smooth. I was hoping Rudolf is actually working on an extensible libGL.so version, so everything wouldbe transparent. This will rock!