[Bf-committers] OpenGL compliance test

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

With more and more people using Blender, we get into troubles with  
OpenGL again. It resembles the situation in NaN, where we had to invest  
in all types of gfx cards and build a testing farm. Daniel Dunbar did  
some nice work then in testing several PC configurations (Linux,  
Windows) and drivers settings.

For an open source organization we have to do this differently... and I  
don't know yet how to exactly solve it. We could seek cooperation with  
other OpenGL projects, but most likely the gamers side of OpenGL world  
won't have the troubles we encounter. I could also ask opengl.org for  
help with it...

One idea I had was developing a simple Ghost based test program,  
opening 2 windows and doing all kinds of checks, including asking the  
user to close windows, hide them, switch desktop or focus, etc.
The most common errors are in 2d commands, like pixel reading and  
drawing, frontbuffer drawing, and this using glViewport and glScissor  
switching a lot.

I'm curious to find out if there's a good cross platform other OpenGL  
application existing we could use as verification test. People are less  
likely to blame us when they find out similar programs all suffer from  
the same errors. (And no, the famous OpenGL Gears is a plain dumb  
example!).

Then there's the problem of actively managing a database with reports  
from users... like the thread Matt posted a long time ago on the 'news  
and chat' forum. We need someone to digest all this info, and build a  
good spreadsheet out of it. Maybe this is something to write in  
php/mysql, where people can easily submit their own system stats.

So:
- other opengl projects we can cooperate with?
- other opengl progs we can use as verification?
- someone interested in building a database?

-Ton-


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Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton@blender.org  
http://www.blender.org