what are the trade-offs of the opengl driver?

[zim2dive]

In the current releases, there are the stable and beta... those make sense.. and then there is then openGL driver...

Just wondering why someone would/not choose that... does it offer everything that the other drivers do, or different? ie. are there any downsides?

is this in an FAQ somewhere (I did a few searches and didn't come up with a clear cut answer)
(and if not, could it be?)

Just wondering what I would gain/lose by trying the openGL version.

thanks,
Mike

[jeisom]

That is a OpenGL 3.0 driver. Most stuff out there will work just fine with the reqular driver. It is mostly there for developers wishing to use OpenGL 3.0.


HTH

[Thunderbird]

Though 180.10.12 is also very useful now for normal users. As of Wine 1.1.11 we take advantage of some of the new extensions introduced in 180.10.12 namely ARB_texture_rg which makes hdr floating point formats (r16f, r32f ..) way more efficient and this can boost performance a lot in more modern games.

[zim2dive]

Originally Posted by jeisom

That is a OpenGL 3.0 driver. Most stuff out there will work just fine with the reqular driver. It is mostly there for developers wishing to use OpenGL 3.0.


HTH

Again, does it _omit_ things in the non opengl drivers? ie. why wouldn't I use it? Can it only help, or can it somehow hurt?

Also its not marked as being beta/stable.

Just trying to understand why its there and since it is there, it presents me with a choice, and I have no information about why I would or would not try to use it, and what to expect if I did.

(in particular, and operating in great ignorance of how different apps do their graphics, given the lousy Flash performance I have on my 8200, I wondered if it could offer me any help there)

thanks!

[Lysius]

It is surely beta quality (based on an outdated beta driver and it has been announced as beta in http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=124813 ). You miss all the fixes from 180.16 and 180.18 if you use it. Also there might be new bugs in addition to the ones in the "normal" driver.

You will most likely not profit from OpenGL 3.0 at the moment (afaik, there are no games supporting it), but as thunderbird wrote, the new extensions to OpenGL 2.1 might be usefull.

I don't think it does anything to flash performance, but you can give it a try.

[Linuxhippy]

why don't you simply try it?

[zim2dive]

Originally Posted by Linuxhippy

why don't you simply try it?

a) I wanted to know what to expect

b) I have gotten any of the 180.x drivers to run with any semblance of stability on my system so far.. major crashes and hangs (8200 chipset). But in my quest to get fullscreen flash performance above single-digit fps, I might have been willing if it would have somehow helped there...

mostly just trying to learn what and why it existed...

[xin44]

less buggy as 180.x serie for me (8 hours with no freeze - then 3 freeze [but no screen flash] / ctrl alt bcksp in 5 mn [but no hard reboot] ... perhaps just random ... i test it again this day)

[Lysius]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

Though 180.10.12 is also very useful now for normal users. As of Wine 1.1.11 we take advantage of some of the new extensions introduced in 180.10.12 namely ARB_texture_rg which makes hdr floating point formats (r16f, r32f ..) way more efficient and this can boost performance a lot in more modern games.

On my Geforce Go 7600 I have the aditional extensions GL_ARB_map_buffer_range and GL_EXT_texture_swizzle.

Is this ARB_texture_rg limited to geforce >=8 or is it the same as GL_ARB_map_buffer_range ?

[Lysius]

I have tested this on my 8800GTS and in addition to the two extensions mentioned above, I also have GL_ARB_texture_rg there. So it seems as if the performance improvements in wine are limited to GF>=8.

Are the other extensions also needed somewhere?

BTW: Is there a glxinfo version that supports OpenGL 3.0? At least the version I have only seems to know OpenGL up to 2.1 .

[madmage]

Originally Posted by xin44

less buggy as 180.x serie for me (8 hours with no freeze - then 3 freeze [but no screen flash] / ctrl alt bcksp in 5 mn [but no hard reboot] ... perhaps just random ... i test it again this day)

I experience a similar bug on my non-OpenGL3 driver 180.22 (I mean: freezes and screen flashes), do you know more about this?