Chris Campbell wrote:
> USER AND DEVELOPER SUPPORT
> >From a maintainability standpoint, supporting the various OpenGL
> implementations and 3D graphics accelerator cards on the market today is
> a phenomenal task. In the limited testing that we did between 3 or 4
> cards from different manufacturers, we found that the differing
> functionality between the cards could lead to headaches in the future.
> For example, Board X can accelerate simple lines and polygons. Board Y
> can accelerate lines, but not polys. Board Z can accelerate neither
> lines nor polys. In this example, we may choose to enable OpenGL
> support for X and Y, but not Z, which seems logical, but what may happen
> is that in the long run, since Y can't accelerate polys, we would have
> been better off resorting back to the current Java 2D implementation.
> It is in those in-between cases where we may be causing a performance
> degradation rather than a big boost like one would expect. This leads
> us to the last important point...
Even if you only supported the software implementation of OpenGL,
wouldn't that be some improvement? My experience is that using Java2D
GeneralPath is much slower than OpenGL's glDrawArrays() method, even
without any hardware acceleration. (See
http://wwwdcascr.wr.usgs.gov/projects/gr for an example of the types of
objects I'm drawing.) It seems that GeneralPath could be improved by
taking advantage of the optimized GL software drivers.
Also, platforms other than Windows and Solaris are behind in
implementing and optimizing Java 2. However, some of those platforms
already have fast GL implementations. If the Java reference
imlementations they used took advantage of their existing graphics
libraries, users on those platforms might be able to enjoy fast Java2D
sooner.
-John Donovan
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