Upcoming Qt switch to OpenGL ES on arm64

bret curtis psi29a at gmail.com
Sat Nov 24 14:14:48 GMT 2018


> > But even here in this place I have seen *a lot* of "cheap" arm64 boards. Yes,
> > the RPI3[+] is ubiquitous. And having to render Open GL stuff by CPU is
> > precisely not the fastest thing around.
>
> <paraphrase> "I have a Raspberry Pi (or similar mobile class system that
> has migrated / is migrating away from armel to arm64) and this has
> forced a move from 'mobile' OpenGLES to 'Desktop' OpenGL.  The result of
> which is that because that platform (and those like it) do not have
> hardware acceleration for OpenGL but DO for OpenGLES you think we should
> change the whole architecture for your use case." </paraphrase>
>

This is a very wrong assumption, the OpenGL on a RPi (all of them) is
hardware accelerated via the VC4 mesa driver by Eric Anholt which is
shipped, by default, on by Raspbian. It supports up to OpenGL 2.1 and
if you plan on having hardware accelerated X11 or Wayland, you need
the VC4 driver. You'll need "Desktop" OpenGL otherwise nothing will
work on a RPi system, which as of 2015 has over 5 million units
shipped. This is not an insignificant user base.

IMHO, the decision to switch away from 'Desktop' OpenGL to GLES was
the wrong decision and should be reversed until a solution is found to
support both.

Cheers,
Bret



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