Hi Clemens,
On May 30, 2008, at 1:13 AM, Clemens Eisserer wrote:
Hi,
I've had a look at the doDrawGlyphList implementations of both the X11
and the OpenGL pipeline, however I have (as always) some questions:
- Why does the OpenGL pipeline not use setupBlitVector, but instead
does the work itself?
It's been a while since I wrote that code, but I think the primary
reason was so that it plays better with single-threaded rendering
(STR) and the relatively lightweight process of throwing things on the
RenderQueue. As you know, one of the benefits from STR is that it
avoids lots of JNI overhead. The setupBlitVector() method does a
bunch of JNI field fetches from the native level, mallocs a
GlyphBlitVector structure each time, fills it by doing a JNI Get/
ReleasePrimitiveArrayCritical, etc.
This is all mostly necessary work for the software or X11 pipelines,
but with STR, we realized that we already have a structure (the
RenderQueue) that could be used to hold the glyph list information
during the rendering process. Even better, all that information is
available at the Java level, so we can easily stuff the GlyphInfos on
the RenderQueue without dipping down into JNI (see
BufferedTextPipe.enqueueGlyphList() method), and then when the queue
is flushed (rendered), we can do the last little bit of massaging
"inline" at the native level (see OGLTR_DrawGlyphList()). No need for
setupBlitVector(), and overall it's quite an efficient process.
- Are the values in GlyphInfo always the same, if the glyph does not
change (x/y/width/height)?
Phil will correct me if I'm wrong... When a String or GlyphVector or
whatever is rendered, each time a new set of GlyphInfo "instances" are
generated depending on the position of the text (i.e. the GlyphList)
on the screen, etc. So once a GlyphList and its associated GlyphInfos
has been created, those fields won't change, but of course it's a
temporary structure, only valid for that one time that the GlyphList
is rendered.
I ask, because XRender does store quite the same information on the
server when caching the glyphs, and if these values would stay the
same, I could avoid sending e.g. the position-fionrormation for every
glyph drawn.
I'm not sure at which level you (or rather XRender) are caching the
glyphs. You can certainly cache the glyph images, as we do for OGL/
D3D (see AccelGlyphCache.c), but I don't see how you could (or would
want to) cache position information, etc.
Anyway, Phil's much more knowledgable with this stuff, so I'll stop
talking now :)
Thanks,
Chris
Or could it happen that the same glyphs are rendered with different
offset or width (e.g. "stretched" text)?
Thanks, Clemens
