People following the AROS developers mailing list had already noticed some works by Krzysztof "deadwood" Smiechowicz on Gallium3D, but the news is finally official and I can spread it on this site: the heavy task to bring 3D acceleration to AROS has finally started! Gallium3D is an increasingly popular software library which enables hardware and software acceleration on a wide range of video cards and operating systems, and provides a unified API which exposes standard hardware functions, like shader units on modern GPUs. Once ported, it will allow hardware acceleration on MESA apps and games, providing also a backend for GPGPU infrastructures. Krzysztof has also made a little video showing his first results, which shows a lightning-fast rotating cube:
The road to a full port and implementation of Gallium3D in AROS is still long, but this video is amazingly promising. For lovers of technical details, Krzysztof has said on AROS-EXEC that “AROS needs to be started in VESA mode. The the demo application is run and it starts the gallium hardware driver. This means that at the same time there are two drivers talking to the card - one in VESA way, the other one in nVidia way. Lucky they don't crash. In final version the mesa.library will be using the hardware gallium drivers, so each appliation already compiled against current version of mesa.library will in future received hardware acceleration”.
And I am really proud to notice that everything is running on… Icaros Desktop!
