News: 0001488240

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" State Tracker To Be Retired

([Mesa] 6 Hours Ago Gallium Nine)


It's crazy that [1]Gallium Nine is already a decade old for providing a Direct3D 9 (D3D9) state tracker implementation for Gallium3D hardware drivers. Gallium Nine was useful years ago for speeding up Direct3D 9 support when using Wine on Linux for Windows games/applications but it hasn't been well maintained in years with DXVK pretty much taking over for efficiently mapping Direct3D atop the Vulkan API. It's time to sunset Gallium Nine.

In the early years and well before Vulkan came onto the scene, [2]Gallium Nine allowed for better performance of D3D9 games on Wine. This was also a time at which Valve's Steam Play (Proton) didn't even exist yet. But with time the Nine state tracker has become less relevant. Gallium3D Nine developer Axel Davy recently announced his intention to ending Gallium Nine. It hasn't been well maintained in years, there aren't many users left, and "DXVK just works" well these days. Plus there aren't too many Linux enthusiasts/gamers all focused on D3D9 these days compared to the more recent versions of Direct3D that are also supported by DXVK. Plus DXVK going the Vulkan API route works on more drivers than just the Mesa Gallium3D drivers.

Thus as Axel [3]announced , it's the end of the road for Gallium Nine. The pull request for removing Gallium Nine from the Mesa codebase is expected to be submitted soon.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Gallium+Nine

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgxNzU

[3] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2024-August/226299.html


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With the news that Nancy Reagan has referred to an astrologer when planning
her husband's schedule, and reports of Californians evacuating Los Angeles
on the strength of a prediction from a sixteenth-century physician and
astrologer Michel de Notredame, the image of the U.S. as a scientific and
technological nation has taking a bit of a battering lately. Sadly, such
happenings cannot be dismissed as passing fancies. They are manifestations
of a well-established "anti-science" tendency in the U.S. which, ultimately,
could threaten the country's position as a technological power. . . . The
manifest widespread desire to reject rationality and substitute a series
of quasirandom beliefs in order to understand the universe does not augur
well for a nation deeply concerned about its ability to compete with its
industrial equals. To the degree that it reflects the thinking of a
significant section of the public, this point of view encourages ignorance
of and, indeed, contempt for science and for rational methods of approaching
truth. . . . It is becoming clear that if the U.S. does not pick itself up
soon and devote some effort to educating the young effectively, its hope of
maintaining a semblance of leadership in the world may rest, paradoxically,
with a new wave of technically interested and trained immigrants who do not
suffer from the anti-science disease rampant in an apparently decaying society.
-- Physicist Tony Feinberg, in "New Scientist," May 19, 1988