Hi,
I have my vertex pipeline replacement almost ready to send. Because the fragment pipeline replacement caused a bunch of regressions, I want to give this patch a bit of testing before committing it. I expect slightly more regressions there because the vertex processing stuff is still badly tested, especially lighting.
Can you give the patches a try and see if your game still works? For now the most important part is that the game works without any performance loss or rendering bugs.
This patchset is supposed to address the following issues:
1) Improve performance in applications that are hit hard by drawStridedSlow. I don't know if there are many left, because the vertex buffer fixups really helped here
2) Allow adding features that do not exist in the GL fixed function pipeline(or are not supported by drivers): Vertex blending, tweening, more efficient material tracking, per-vertex point size
3) Make the way towards OpenGL 3 forward compatibility mode
So far (1) should already go some way with these patches. There are no new features added yet, and opengl 3 needs the same stuff implemented with GLSL and further work, but this is a necessary start.
Once these patches are in, I'll turn to fine-tuning things. The rhw handling can be done better(maybe), and vertex buffer loading can be made much cheaper if the pipeline replacement is in use and opengl supports native 16 bit vertex attributes. This should get old card compatibility costs off our backs when we're running on a modern GPU without sacrificing backward compatibility.