Re: [angleproject] ANGLE & Windows RT (8)

[Daniel Koch]

(See my previous responses as well.)

We are currently working on a D3D11 backend, but this is targeting feature level 10. The level 9 feature levels really don't provide enough capabilities to support a full ES2 implementation (which is really quite unfortunate).

Note though that as mentioned in Issue 363, just having a D3D11 renderer isn't sufficient for Windows RT support as the Windows RT environment doesn't support runtime shader compilation.

Hope this helps,

Daniel

On 2012-12-20, at 3:42 AM, msc wrote:

IIRC ANGLE is based on D3D9 (the project home page does not mention any D3D version) and therefore can't run on Windows RT.

Are there any plans for a D3D11 (level 9) version?

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Daniel Koch

Manager, Graphics Technology

TransGaming 

E: dan...@transgaming.com

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[Daniel Koch]

Without run-time shader compilation it won't be that useful... that aside, at the current time we don't have specific plans to add feature level 9 support.  However, we are architecting it so that it should be fairly easy to add that support in later (and it _is_ open source so someone is welcome to make contributions if they really want that).

The biggest problem with the 9-level features is that it won't be able to support a decent ES2 feature set.  Even feature level 9_3 is significantly more restrictive that DX9 SM3 -- it's actually more like SM2.  That said, if an app is going target feature-level 9_x, I guess they'd be stuck with those restrictions anyhow. 

Daniel

On 2013-01-22, at 4:24 AM, quirin...@gmail.com wrote:

Leaving out run-time shader compilation, is it planned to support feature level 9 in the development branchdx11proto? The benefit of supporting feature level 9 in ANGLE would be dramatic, wouldn't it? Apps already shipped for iOS and Android using OpenGL ES 2.0 could be ported to Windows RT a lot quicker, as now manual port to DX11 feature level 9 code would be required, right? Or am I missing something? Any plans for that, yet?

[quirin...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the answer. In fact, I am considering adding feature level 9.  Given all the caveats you mentioned,  I reckon it's wise to add feature-level-9-support not before the implementation for the higher feature levels is completed. How long do you think that's going to take the ANGLE community until, we have a feature-level-higher-than-9 support?

[Daniel Koch]

That would be great!  I'd definitely recommend waiting for the feature-level 10+ support to be completed first. There is still a lot of code churn going on.

I can't say more on completion timeframe than I already stated in earlier threads.  However once you see the dx11proto branch merged into mainline that might be a reasonable time to start looking at it in more detail.

Hope this helps,

Daniel

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