[Panel-devel] OpenGL while composite is enabled : how to deal with that issue

[Pierre D.]

Hi


Let me introduce myself : I'm Pierre Ducroquet, french student and developer 
on the Project Looking Glass.
Looking Glass aims at creating a 3D desktop environment. Don't worry, that's 
not a threat for KDE yet, and that may never be a threat.
But while developing Looking Glass, some issues appeared, making it even 
harder to install... Looking Glass is a full 3D environment, so you can 
easily guess it rely on an OpenGL support. Our current X applications support 
rely on Composite : with composite, we are able to redirect (we also have 
another X extension for events redirection or something like that) the 
windows drawings to an opengl texture.
Don't you see the issue ?

That's simple : most graphic cards drivers won't enable opengl while composite 
is enabled ! Currently, only the nVidia drivers allow that through an 
unstable option : "AllowGLXWithComposite". That means every other graphic 
card can't run Looking Glass with all its features :/

But what with Plasma and KDE4 ? If we use Composite to draw windows shadows 
for instance, we won't be able to launch any 3D application with most graphic 
cards !! And there is another issue : how to draw translucent windows 
containing 3D apps ? I had a discussion with some X.org developers : X.org 
will _perhaps_ allow that for the 7.1 release, but that'll be unstable.

Did you already have a discussion about that with the ATI folks ? Can they add 
a kind of "AllowGLXWithComposite" option ? The same apply for every other 
driver off course :/


Thanks, and good luck for KDE4 (I'll try to help, but I can't promise 
anything)