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Are there raspbian compatible applications that can utilize the GPU of the Raspberry PI other than omxplayer?

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  • The GPU on the 2 is essentially the same as the A/B/+.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Sep 12, 2015 at 13:08

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Are there raspbian compatible applications that can utilize the GPU of the Raspberry PI other than omxplayer?

On pi-specific distros (e.g. Raspbian), the openGL ES libraries are compiled for it and use hardware acceleration. Thus, anything that uses openGL ES would also make use of such and do not need to be specially written for the pi's GPU. This would mostly be applications that involve 3D graphics.

The easy way to check this is to run ldd on the application binary and see if anything points into /opt/vc/lib.

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  • VLC doesnt use the GPU on the PI2. So, the reason is because it does not use OpenGL?
    – Josh
    Sep 12, 2015 at 15:52
  • The GPU has a few possible roles, one of which is vector graphics (openGL) and another of which is decoding video. In the latter case, it is probably not such a big deal to do per application code, which is what vlc does, just not exploiting hardware, and unfortunately there's not much motivation for them to do such device specific variants.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Sep 12, 2015 at 18:08
  • Actually on the Pi OpenGL does not work , including GLX - this is the root cause for extreme frustration when people encounter "missing GLX visuals". Also the reason for Eric Anholts work. OpenGL is not the same as Open GL ES
    – flakeshake
    Jan 13, 2016 at 9:05
  • @flakeshake You're right, and I knew that so I don't know why I did not make the distinction here (perhaps because the question is not specifically about OGL). Anyway, I've edited the reference to read GL ES instead. ES 2.x is a subset of GL 3.x and compatible to that extent, I think, but doubtless a lot of legacy code is still firmly GL 2.x. For Xorg, EGL corresponds to GLX, and (e.g.) recent versions of KDE have started to use it, although I don't know how well or what that means for the pi.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Jan 13, 2016 at 10:24

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