After a day brute force of using QCRenderer, an NSOpenGLView and a pthread, all is working. There is a dramatic speed and performance increase. I have to profile it but it is faster than I have ever seen these compositions run.
In-editor performance is generally pretty bad, QC-wise (this is pretty consistent with my experience as well, and goes all the way back to Tiger) -- a lot of it possibly stems from running on the main thread (along with event/UI handling, and lots of other things.) I've found tying compositions to CVDisplayLinks to be absolutely fantastic, as far as "holy crap this is gorgeous" goes -- it's a shame so many people don't get to see their compositions that way.
The fact that QCCompositionLayer and QCView both render on the main thread is a really big problem. If you only have one window, this shouldn't be a problem. If you app is drawing in other places or you have lots of controls that need updating, the main thread is going to choke your Quartz Composition. I can't believe Apple implemented it this way. If anything, it should run in its own thread.
Do keep in mind that CoreAnimation is (was?) new to Leopard, and QuartzComposer in Leopard was a pretty big step up from what was available in Tiger. In light of that, it's easy to understand an oversight like not handling threads nicely out of the box (after all, QT is what, almost 20 years old, and _still_ doesn't play nicely with threads without gobs of hand-holding?... it's like dealing with the 1980's, I swear) -- This is probably going to be addressed in a future update/OS X release, if I had to guess (Apple's actually pretty good about recommending threads where they make sense, and doing it themselves in their own frameworks after they've been polished a bit). For now, the workarounds aren't too impossible (as you've demonstrated), so it's not as much of a priority I'd bet.
Apologetics aside, yes, main-thread rendering is a bad idea :)
The only thing I have to figure out is how to make it work in a layer so I can take advantage of other CoreAnimaiton features.
CAOpenGLLayer, using the CGLContextObj? (totally grasping at straws, but I think that's more or less the right direction)
-- [ christopher wright ] [email protected] http://kineme.net/
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