cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Archives Discussions

cybernoid
Adept I

Direct State Access on Radeon 5870

Will this ever be supported on this card?

0 Likes
1 Solution
jtrudeau
Staff

To answer your question explicitly, it is in the plan. I cannot saywhen, because software release schedules are notoriously fickle in this industry, and I do not want you to rely on uncertain information. But, yes, it will be supported in an upcoming driver release.

View solution in original post

0 Likes
8 Replies
natasha
Elite

This card is available for free at High performance computing on graphics processing units | hgpu.org. I think, you can test this there.

0 Likes

I have the card and it doesn't expose DSA in OpenGL, hence my question...

0 Likes

Let me see if I can dig something up. I may not be able to answer a question like "will this ever be supported." But let's find out.

0 Likes

Sure I understand,  I imagine DSA isn't a hardware restriction for it.  The Radeon 5870 is a good low end target these days and from the latest drivers it halfway supports OpenGL 4.5 already, so if it had DSA and some future vendor neutral extension for command buffers it would greatly simplify writing modern OpenGL applications.  In fact it would create a nice interim playing field of having to only support OpenGL4.4 + DSA + Hopeful-Command-Buffers, and Vulkan.  And of course greatly help everyone's transition towards Vulkan.

0 Likes
jtrudeau
Staff

To answer your question explicitly, it is in the plan. I cannot saywhen, because software release schedules are notoriously fickle in this industry, and I do not want you to rely on uncertain information. But, yes, it will be supported in an upcoming driver release.

0 Likes

Ok that's good to know it's at least planned!  Thank you.

0 Likes

Don't know if it helps, but, even though GL_ARB_direct_state_access isn't supported in current drivers (15.4b), GL_EXT_direct_state_access works just fine and I haven't had any compatibility issues with it (yet).

I have a basic DSA wrapper that uses the appropriate function calls depending on the build (4.4/4.5), and aside from passing a target parameter to functions and settling for glGen* functions instead of the shinny glCreate* ones, it doesn't stop me from writing a 4.5-like codebase.

R9 290 + EXT_DSA and 760 + ARB_DSA produce the same results so it might be worth giving it a try.

0 Likes

Thanks that's good info the EXT appears to be working - I didn't realise that existed.  And knowing that the ARB one will likely will be supported on our minimum spec Radeon 5870 means I can take the risk to wrap that as you say to remove later when the drivers expose the ARB version.

I imagine if the Radeon 5870 supported OpenGL 4.5 fully without performance issues, and then they made a 4.6 that it supported, that depreciated all the non DSA to error that would be a great boon to developers confusion!

0 Likes