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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Optimistic that OpenGL 2.1 will be available by the end of the year on Asahi - well that is news. It's only 2.1, but that's enough (as stated) for a web browser, desktop acceleration, and old games.

Also RIP all the countless pessimistic "engineers" here and elsewhere saying we'd be waiting for years more for any graphics acceleration.

Edit: It is true though that AAA Gaming will wait: "Please temper your expectations: even with hardware documentation, an optimized Vulkan driver stack (with enough features to layer OpenGL 4.6 with Zink) requires over many years of full time work. At least for now, nobody is working on this driver full time. Reverse-engineering slows the process considerably. We won’t be playing AAA games any time soon."

Still, even if that be the case, accelerated desktop is an accelerated desktop, much sooner than many expected.

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OpenGL 2.1 is not enough for browsers - Firefox requires OpenGL 3.2 for limited hardware acceleration support, and there will be limitations on Chrome as well. Desktop acceleration is a similar story, KWin will have a degraded experience for OpenGL less than 3. There is also the possibility of breakage due to missing extensions.

Most old games won't work because most are going to require OpenGL>=3. For D3D games from Windows, translation efforts have long been focused on Vulkan, and even then, you are very likely to require extensions which aren't present or further versions of OpenGL.

So that's to say that, it's not about AAA games, it's about Firefox, (full) KDE, and Minecraft. Which is going to take a few years, probably. There is no RIP, it's going about as well as those people were predicting - I'm expecting it's not going to be able to have full browser acceleration and play Minecraft until 2 more years at the very least.

It's pretty insane that OpenGL 2.1 is even functional on a GPU this strange, but remember; this is still an unfinished, hacky implementation (the author's own concession). Plus, you're going to be stuck on x11 until any serious GPU drivers get written, which in many people's opinion is just as bad as no hardware acceleration at all. No MacOS-like trackpad gestures either, you'll be waiting for Wayland support to get that too. It'll definitely be a boon for web browsing though, so I won't deny that. What I'm really curious about is older WINE titles with Box86, if you could get DOS titles like Diablo 2 running smoothly, it could probably replace my Switch as a portable emulation machine...

I'm a bit confused as to why X11/wayland would be a huge issue here? The Mesa docs do say X11-only, but they're referring to running the driver on macOS (hence the XQuartz reference), where Wayland basically doesn't exist.

Ah, looks like I definitely missed that.

In any case, I don't think Asahi/M1 has proper KWin or Mutter support yet. It's still going to take a while before you get a truly smooth desktop Linux experience on those devices, but some hardware acceleration is definitely better than none!

> pretty insane that OpenGL 2.1 is even functional on a GPU this strange,

Well... you were one of the most vocal critics saying it wouldn't happen anytime soon.

> unfinished, hacky implementation (the author's own concession)

Still more stable than Intel's official Arc drivers, so who defines "hacky"? ;)

> Plus, you're going to be stuck on x11 until any serious GPU drivers get written

Only because it is running on macOS, which supports X11 but not Wayland. On Linux, Wayland or X11 will both work, no problem.

> No MacOS-like trackpad gestures either, you'll be waiting for Wayland support to get that too

Again, Wayland will work on Day 1, it's just a limitation of running the driver on macOS until the kernel support is ready. When it is on Linux, Wayland will be a full-go.

> Well... you were one of the most vocal critics saying it wouldn't happen anytime soon.

Yep. Been beating that drum since 2020, looks history proved me right on this one.

> Still more stable than Intel's official Arc drivers, so who defines "hacky"? ;)

Apparently not me, I had no idea that the M1 supported Vulkan and DirectX 12.

Why would you need Wayland for trackpad gestures?

You technicay don't, but the implementations on X are kinda terrible and can't do 1:1

I mean the signs were clear for basically one and a half years now. It was never a question of if. But a question of when. There were just so many voices that didn't know what they were talking about. Comparing it to nouveau for example.

> if you could get DOS titles like Diablo 2

Did you mean some other title? Even diablo 1 was a Windows game.

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