Its not about having issues or not having issues, its about how much performance you consume for the GUI alone.
I have installed both CPU performance monitor for 2.0GHZ Core2Duo iMac and my new i5 3.2 Ghz iMac. Moving a system browser window in the old iMac spikes the CPUs to 50-70% while moving the window in the new iMac is down to 20%. Of course the old imac is 7 years old the new one is 5 months old. The question here is "does it really worth doing something about it ?" . Sure if you a creating the new CryEngine in Pharo it would be a major problem or any 3d game app that taxes even modern CPUs. But for non demanding usage even if pharo community does absolutely nothing this 20% will shrink down to 10% then 5% , 2.5% and eventually 1%. This has been also a major argument point for cpython. People used to complain A LOT about cpython's performance in old cpus, cause lets face it in some scenarios and many scenarios it was a BIG problem BUT nowday those voices are getting more and more quieter because CPUs have become insanely fast and there is no indication this will stop now. So on the subject of whether we need GPU accelerated GUI at large as a community I would say "Definetly Not" ,Morphic is messy enough as it is, lets not make it more complex..... please ! I am not saying that GPU acceleration does not have its merits, I am using Blender for 3d modeling and its new render engine Cycles makes uses of CUDA and its SWEET , I can almost have real time rendering, not final quality , but still good enough to see how it would look in the final render. Real time rendering to a 3d artist is like live coding to a coder. Its like Christmas vacation in Santa Claus Toy Factory. But on the other hand none stops anyone from implementing a third party library that runs pharo headless and then uses the OS to open a new window completely bypassing morphic and taking advantage of GPU. I don't think we need to make Morphic more complex than it already is. Pharo should be first about simplicity and then performance. But then if you can improve performance of Morphic and yet keep it simple enough please be my guest. On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 1:47 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Hilaire Fernandes < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> We could try to organize a task force on that matter. I will try to >> submit some proposals later, but now I want to prepare a delicious cake. >> > > Ha, cool. I am cleaning the home :-) > > Jokes aside, it is true that the Pharo UI is quite slow. > I do not have issues on my Core i7 PC but on my Core2Duo Mac it shows... > > There are enough benefits to having a software UI (flexibility etc) to > suffer that. > > But there is for sure room for improvement. > > As resolutions go higher, this problem will only get worse. > > Where would one have to start looking for performance improvements? > > Phil > > >> Hilaire >> >> Le 31/05/2014 10:48, Clément Bera a écrit : >> > The second thing is that BitBlt is slow for 2 reasons: it is bit based >> > and not vector based and its implementation half in the VM half in the >> > image forces to copy a huge number of bits that could be avoided >> > >> > So the answer is that you need to contribute to the refactoring of >> > Morphic or to Athens. >> > >> > GUI hardware acceleration is clearly not the problem yet. >> > >> >> -- >> Dr. Geo http://drgeo.eu >> >> >> >
