Keith Lea wrote:
Chet Haase wrote:
The current plan is for the OpenGL pipeline to be disabled by default, but enabled via a command-line flag. This is due to concerns over robustness (especially with the somewhat chaotic state of GL driver support on both Linux and Windows) and performance for some operations (OpenGL tends to get incredible performance for advanced rendering features but performance for some simple operations can be less amazing due to pbuffer support and acceleration on many drivers/hardware. We're working on both of these issues, but that's why this otherwise pretty awesome hw acceleration feature will not be enabled by default...
Does this mean that applets and programs run by double-clicking a jar file won't be able to use the OpenGL pipeline, unless the user knows the command line switch (in the case of jars)? This seems like a crazy idea, considering the amount of effort going into the OpenGL pipeline. I imagine that disabling it by default will make it so that for 99% of people, the OpenGL pipeline won't be used. Most users don't want to open the command line to run a program and they don't want to have to remember -Ds.d.sdf.asd.OpenGL=true every time they run a program, and most users don't know how to modify the file association for .jar to pass in that property.
No one expects "users" to do this. "developers" and "deployers" will to it, if they know its OK. And a system property set in the "main" program before 2D is initialised will work just fine.
This decision makes me mad at Sun. It seems they always start something good and then mess it up, like making an OpenGL pipeline then making it so no one will use it and it's hard to enable.
The reason its not enabled by default is that its chances of working properly are not great and its not due to bugs in JDK - its due to bugs and limitations in OpenGL.
I think what would make people really mad is enabling by default something that causes most people's apps to behave incorrectly or perhaps even crash whilst perhaps offering minimal benefit. So this is prudence not craziness. And its reluctant prudence until the state of OpenGL gets better. The engineer working on this is probably even sicker about this than you are.
-phil.
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