NVIDIA and TLS
Daniel Eischen
eischen at pcnet.com
Mon Jun 16 15:20:08 PDT 2003
On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Julian Elischer wrote:
>
> On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Gareth Hughes wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Andy Ritger wrote:
> > >
> > > So from an OpenGL point of view, here are several alternatives that
> > > I see for atleast the near term:
> > >
> > > - make NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation not thread-safe (just
> > > use global data rather that thread-local data)
> > >
> > > - accept the performance hit of using pthread_getspecific()
> > > on FreeBSD. From talking to other OpenGL engineers,
> > > conservative estimates of the performance impact on
> > > applications like viewperf range from 10% - 15%. I'd like
> > > to quantify that, but certainly there will be a performance
> > > penalty.
> >
> > And these are *very* conservative estimates -- you're essentially adding a
> > function call into a path that is, on average, less than ten instructions
> > per OpenGL API call, where the number of API calls per frame is upward of 3
I see this as a problem with the OpenGL API. You're trying
to make something thread-safe that isn't by its nature.
I would rather see OpenGL-MT with new interfaces that
are by nature thread-safe.
--
Dan Eischen
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