On Fri, 6 May 2005, Tim Long wrote:
Software-only rendering was discussed at a talk by Keith Packard, long time X guru, at LinuxConf 2005 a fortnight ago. He said it's just not workable anywhere outside the PDA market. Modern GUIs spend a lot of time shuffling pixmaps - windows, icons, etc - around, and without hardware acceleration this is viewed as unacceptably slow by the majority of desktop users. (As PDAs get bigger screens, they'll go the same way.)
I am not an expert, but with my limited understanding of graphics chips I believe that with the new demands being placed of graphics by the eye candy crowd that that any professional level card will need a 2D engine independant of the 3D/OpenGL pipeline. This is because a professional level card will need to be able to run an openGl thread and the eye candy simultaneously in the new graphics enviroments. Otherwise your OpenGL app and your anti-aliased xterm will become bogged down as the former and your X server fight over control over the graphics pipeline. One way around this problem is that when an opengl context starts then the X server will fall back to software rendering.
A consumer level card will probably not need such a facility as Joe Public will either be running desktop publishing or a full screen game,
not both simultaneously.
If I don't remember things all wrong, didn't MacOSX go for an OpenGL based desktop environment in the later versions, wouldn't you in that case get a struggle over pipes there, or would everything be treated as 3D?
Even XFree86 and Xorg-X11 seems to be in the path to use more none 2D features that the cards provides too. As an ignorant member of the maillist, would it be better to think a little bit into the future and keep/add things that will be usefull in a X Windows System based desktop, as long as it won't affect the cost all to much of the end product that at least I'm thinking of buying.
-- //Aho
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