Am Thursday 25 June 2009 11:45:19 schrieb Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle@t-systems.com:
Stefan,
Generally, turning off GLSL turns down the advertised shader model to 1.x, which is the d3d8 feature set.
Is this still the case since your mail http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-June/076766.html
No - it is 2.0 now, or even 3.0 with the NV extensions. However, if the hardware supports less than 256 vertex shader constants, we still advertise SM 1.x. That is usually the case on HW that does not support more than SM 1.x anyway. If we advertised SM 2.0 on these cards, many shaders would very likely fall back to software rendering.
Does the Intel i915 qualify? How do I tell? How is this related to Mesa? Would it require a Mesa much newer than Ubuntu 8.10 (yeah, I know 9.04 is around)?
In theory SM 2.0 with ARB. Mesa drivers are generally in a bad shape, especially the ones that are shipped by ubuntu, so many games are expected to fail. Shaders are just a small part of the equation.
This ARB works helps Mesa insofar because it gives somewhat decent shader support without requiring a GLSL compiler. A GLSL compiler has to be pretty darn good to work properly with Wine, so before Gallium3D is stable and in use, I don't expect GLSL to work well in complex games with open source drivers.
I talked to some Mesa developers on #winehackers, they might introduce their own ATI/Intel/Mesa specific extensions for SM 3.0 support on top of ARB shaders. Ie, a subset of the NV extensions that ATI cards support. (Nvidia HW supports more things than D3D makes available, and ATI cards can't support the full NV asm extensions)