On 5/15/05, J.O. Aho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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?
There is only one pipe that does both 2D and 3D. Fortunately, there isn't much state information that had to be reloaded to switch contexts. The biggest problem, from a real-time point of view, is the latency involved in waiting for the pipeline to drain. Processes will just have to sleep, waiting on the interrupt. > > 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. Yes, X11 is starting to use 3D features. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
