Client setup

The Maria client setup will mainly be application specific, but there are a few common settings that control the low level components of the system that will be relevant for all Maria applications.

Command line options

All Maria GDK client applications will by default support a command line option to override the map rendering backend. This will work as long as no explicit rewrite of the application argument vector is done. The command line option is --glmode <mode> where <mode> can be one of the following:

• angle (default). Use the ANGLE OpenGL/Direct3D renderer. This option has the best performance, and should in general work for most platforms. For more control over the Direct3D backend, see the GPU Blacklist section below.
• opengl Use the desktop OpenGL driver. This is generally not recommended, but may be useful for certain corner cases. This will give full hardware acceleration in the map renderer, but involves a software buffer copy that may cause slowdowns, especially on higher resolution displays.
• software Pure software OpenGL rendering, with software frame buffer copy. This is the slowest option, but most compatible.

GPU Blacklist

The map rendering core of Maria GDK uses the graphics processing unit, and may be sensitive to bugs and peculiarities in certain graphics card drivers. Therefore we support a configuration file that enables and disables certain features based on the GPU ID, Vendor and driver versions. This file should be named gl_blacklist.json and be located along with the .exe file.

This file is based on the Qt OpenGL bug file which utilizes the format of the driver bug list used in the Chromium projects. It consists of a list of entries each of which specifies a set of conditions and a list of feature keywords. Typically, device id and vendor id are used to match a specific graphics card. They can be found in the output of the dxdiag tool.

These values are also written to the client log file on DEBUG log level, for example:

2017-09-29 14:25:27,903 [1] DEBUG MariaNativeRendering - GPU Info:
         Card name: Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
       Driver Name: igdumdim64.dll
    Driver Version: 21.20.16.4664
         Vendor ID: 0x8086
         Device ID: 0x191B
         SubSys ID: 0x06E51028
       Revision ID: 0x0006

The following feature keywords are relevant for choosing the OpenGL implementation:

• disable_angle - (Maria GDK 3.2 and newer) Disables ANGLE. Do not use ANGLE/Direct3D, use software OpenGL rendering instead. This should work on most platforms, but at a lower performance.
• disable_d3d11 - Disables the D3D11 rasterizer in ANGLE. Instead, the next D3D rendering option is tried first. The default order is: D3D11, D3D9, WARP, reference implementation.
• disable_d3d9 - Disables the D3D9 rasterizer in ANGLE (D3D11 may still be used if available.)

{
"entries": [
{
  "id": 1,
  "description": "Disable D3D11 on older nVidia drivers",
  "vendor_id": "0x10de",
  "device_id": ["0x0DE9"],
  "driver_version": {
    "op": "<=",
    "value": "8.17.12.6973"
  },
  "features": [
    "disable_d3d11"
  ]
}
]
}

The supported keys for matching a given card or driver are the following.

• os.release - Specifies a list of operating system releases on Windows: xp, vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10.
• vendor_id - Vendor from the adapter identifier
• device_id - List of PCI device IDs.
• driver_version - Driver version from the adapter identifier
• driver_description - Matches when the value is a substring of the driver description from the adapter identifier
• gl_vendor - Matches when the value is a substring of the GL_VENDOR string