Status of 3D acceleration

[raphaelthegreat]

There are various issues regarding gpu support, as there are a lot of things that need to be done. There exist the amazing freegnm written by @pipehuffer. That includes all components needed for basic rendering and is an excellent candidate for this. It being in C makes it a little more verbose to program compared to using c++, so I believe OpenOrbis should implement a wrapper around that API. I can think of several options

• freegnm is integrated into OpenOrbis and reworked into a more C++ like API
• freegnm is kept as an external dependency and OpenOrbis simply provides a wrapper
• Nothing of the above

I'm personally fond of first option as its most convenient and together with a potential cmake toolchain will make prototyping samples and hardware tests much faster. I would like to work on this but I'm not sure if any existing work of that sort exists already and what opinions maintainers have about it

[pipehuffer]

Another 2 options could be:

• Forking freegnm then gradually port it to C++ and remove any unneeded functionality (taking over it instead of integrating it as a dependency)
• Writing a new library focused on PS4 usage only from scratch

The latter may look like more work, but may make sense because:

• It could be implemented it in C++
• It could focus only on 3D graphics on the PS4, thus making it simpler, unlike freegnm (which tries to implement that along with (half-broken) tools and emulation utility).
• Development would be handled by the OpenOrbis people instead of one (1) random dude

[raphaelthegreat]

For PS4 specifically, I think we definitely need at minimum

• Command buffer classes for gfx and compute queues. These can just be lightweight wrappers over emitting raw pm4 packets
• Utilities for managing image/buffer/sampler sharps (probably wrapper classes as well) and some system to manage binding them to a shader (where to copy them in the table shader fetches)
• GpuAddress library for computing surface bounds on allocated memory
• A shader compiler + a format for loading shaders (should it consume gcn assembly, use a language like spirv/slang or both?)

Freegnm does seem to partially cover these so could be used as starting point probably