On Tue, May 22, 2001 at 11:46:34AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Tue, 22 May 2001, Daryll Strauss wrote:
>
> Right, but what I want is "Here are your options, and you cannot
> choose DRI in a configuration that will make the machine lock up
> due to memory constraints."
We shouldn't lock up. That's a bug. We should fix it.
The trickier one is "Why isn't 3D hardware accelerated." All we can do
is report that we disabled for the user.
> Just a question: Does Windows suffer from similar problems?
> I've never noticed myself, but I'm just wondering how this is
> handled in Windows video drivers, or is it a problem there too?
> Or is this something due to X not being able to change depth on
> the fly?
X gives you a ton of flexibility in configuring the device. Normally
Windows gives you specific choices of what modes they accept. So, if X
were Windows we would just enabled everything and say "Nothing larger
than 1280x1024 is supported."
There is a technical issue we should fix at some point, which is to
improve offscreen memory management. Right now X and 3D don't cooperate
as nicely as they should. That would let us use memory more efficiently.
> Also, is it the RandR extension that will provide depth switching
> support? I remember Keith talking at the XFree86 BOF at LWE
> about it. Does depth switching fit under "Resize"? Or is that
> another extension?
Yes, that supports depth switching. Although I think it does it by
translating data to a native depth so the memory requirements are still
there. Anyone else know for sure?
Another thing games do in Windows is go into "full screen mode." That
allows them resize on the fly and then grab all the rest of the
resources because they know nothing else is running. (For example, your
desktop is at 1600x1200, but you start quake at 640x480 full screen. We
now can pretend the desktop is 640x480 and grab all those resources
back) Fullscreen mode is a little tricky to do right. We have an
architecture to support it, but most of our drivers don't do much with
it yet. Also, to do it right, applications would have to make a call to
change to full screen mode.
- |Daryll
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