On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Henri Verbeet hverbeet@gmail.com wrote:
On 20 July 2010 15:49, Luke Bratch l_bratch@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Adds detection for the Nvidia 8800GTX card and sets its video memory correctly.
I have sent this patch in the past but it got rejected, as this method of calculating video card type/memory wasn't supposed to stay around forever, but another similar patch got accepted yesterday so I'm trying again.
I mostly let Roderick worry about card detection, but at the very least this patch has a trailing tab and a driver version number that's inconsistent with the other entries.
I think the main reason you want to add the 8800 GTX is because of GPU memory detection (the fact that it is detected as a slightly slower 8800 is not a real issue). I would rather not add all different types of GPU models.
In the long term we might want to change our GPU detection logic. In case of Nvidia it would make sense to use NV-CONTROL which is an X11 extension for that we would have to move the logic to winex11.drv (and that might also be better since some apps want to see the proper driver name). For other vendors there is no good mechanism. ATI has ATIFGLEXTENSION but they discourage using it. I emailed with a few months ago and they would rather see us using 'libatiadlxx.so / atiadlxx.dll' but I believe it doesn't go through X11 which isn't nice. For other vendors there is no mechanism at all.
As a short term solution we might want to use GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info. It provides the total amount of memory info, the amount of free texture memory and some more things. I have used this extension in some projects and it works fine but the extension is still experimental. It is quite easy to add some basic support for it (I would not use the free video memory code yet) but I'm not sure if we want to support this yet since the extension is experimental. If it is fine by Henri, I can add it as it would help a lot of users.
Roderick