Now one quick question comes to mind with respect to my other application. If translucency isn't currently hardware accelerated - is Java actually doing pixel tests for overlapping translucent objects? If so, that would explain my performance woes. I would only want to draw translucent stuff if I knew it was hardware accelerated.
I'm not sure what you mean by "pixel tests for overlapping translucent objects".
Whenever you draw translucently, if we software render it then it is a read, modify, write operation. We should have tests in most places that test "if alpha is opaque then just write the pixel", though. Have you done tests that show that translucent rendering is too slow? I'm wondering why you prejudge that it won't be possible without hardware acceleration. There are a couple of things to be aware of for best translucent rendering, though.
For example, software rendered translucency to a BufferedImage will be much faster than translucency to most accelerated framebuffers until we get acceleration for the translucency. The reason is that most of the latest framebuffers are much slower to read a pixel than to write a pixel and the operation will bypass the processor cache, whereas a BufferedImage will be stored in system memory and reading and writing will be just simple memory operations to the processor's cache.
If you have an operation that is doing Area calculations on RR2Ds and also rendering them translucently, I would think you are being hurt more by the Area operations than by the blending operations, even if they are software. But, if you are rendering translucency directly to the fb, then that may make the difference due to the added overhead of poor readback performance from the framebuffer, but Area is not very efficient with large numbers of objects...
...jim
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