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karolherbst 🐧 🦀

@marcan well.. Nvidia still has native 2D acceleration commands 🙃 But I think it's the only vendor having that.

It also didn't change for 10 years. So maybe it gets deleted at some point.

15 May 2023 at 10:06 | Wall-to-wall | Open on chaos.social
5 comments
Hector Martin

@karolherbst Ah, but who says I consider Nvidia hardware "modern"? 🙃

15 May 2023 at 10:07 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
karolherbst 🐧 🦀

@marcan yeah.. though I kinda see their point using the 2D stuff to do large buffer copies instead of running a shader just copying bytes :D

I have no idea if they actually have a 2D block or if it's emulated in shaders on the hardware.

Anyway, the advantage is: implementing a driver is simpler (and has less CPU overhead). And I wouldn't be surprised it's the reason they kept it as it's still useful within writing a Vulkan (or whatever API) driver.

15 May 2023 at 10:10 | Open on chaos.social
Hector Martin

@karolherbst Apple has a blitter too, but that isn't really a 2D engine (it's meant more for copies and mipmapping). Though they still use just shaders copying bits in some cases I think.

15 May 2023 at 10:12 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
karolherbst 🐧 🦀

@marcan yeah I know, the 2D stuff in Nvidia still is able to draw primitives and stuff, so a buffer copy is two lines and one rect 🙃.

They even have polylines. Anyway, in case you are interested, it's all defined here: github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-doc

But in the end it doesn't matter, because modern GUI won't use the X API to accelerate drawing their primitives anymore anyway. But it's still there if one wants to use it! :D

No idea if they plan to remove it though.

@marcan yeah I know, the 2D stuff in Nvidia still is able to draw primitives and stuff, so a buffer copy is two lines and one rect 🙃.

They even have polylines. Anyway, in case you are interested, it's all defined here: github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-doc

But in the end it doesn't matter, because modern GUI won't use the X API to accelerate drawing their primitives anymore anyway. But it's still there if one wants to use it! :D

15 May 2023 at 10:16 | Open on chaos.social
CounterPillow

@karolherbst @marcan On the ARM SoC side of things, Rockchip likes to throw blitters into everything. Multiple. There's not just the full blitter blocks with gradient fill functions, pixel format conversions, scaling, compositing, and rotating, of which there are sometimes several per SoC, but your video output block can scale and composite too, and your video decoder can scale as well. These are all in the same SoC (RK3588), in addition to a full Mali GPU.
15 May 2023 at 11:13 | Open on mastodon.social
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