I'm not quite convinced that that is an objective comparison however. Was Quake 3 running in both operating systems with the exact same 3D settings?Of course not! ;-) I am as skeptical as you are regarding similar tests.
However - a demonstration like this helps me when proving that X is not slow.
Furthermore - I can now challenge anyone to run Half Life accelerated remotely on Windows, when the same thing is easy to do with GNU/Linux. ;-)
Still - what you get from current popular IT literature are very easily refutable tests that the public none the less believes in. Now - there are two things I can do - point that the test is unscientific, something that no one is interested in publishing as a "proof" is very boring (and people "just love simple numbers pointing to the undisputable winner"). The other thing is to actually make a simple demo and demonstrate in a flashy manner (everyone loves demos) that the "test" is obviously flawed.
Scientific tests are a very important thing, I just want to make sure that unscientific ones are not used anti-XFree86-wise ;-)
Quite frankly... random uninformed people making claims that X is slow, without any shred of a clue or properly deduced scientifically measured and reproduceable instrumented data, will always be out there. We can't stop people from spreading unfounded rumours nor from making random guesses as to why they or someone they know may be experiencing slowdowns in some application or another.Actually we can. Make a good demonstration, so that people see that the sentence "X is slow" is obviously and without any doubt flawed.
I don't think trying to "prove" anything to people who will believe whatever they want to believe helps us any at all personally...I think it helps us prevent the stupid rumor propagating. A vaccine will not heal people, but it will prevent a disease from spreading.
The best thing any of us can do, is continue to properly and scientifically analyze the X server, it's video drivers, and other related technologies, profile them, optimize them, etc.
From a development perspective - yes, you are right. Popularization needs a more pro-active approach.
I know that, and people on the list know that. However I find it difficult to explain it to people that do not know what RENDER is, people that do not want to know what RENDER is, and people that just trust the old saying: "seeing is believing"
Right now, the biggest hit on the desktop is probably unaccelerated RENDER operations. That's what most users likely see as "desktop slowdowns" currently. Over time, those things will improve as people write support.
Best regards:
al_shopov
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