Hello everyone! If you are running TeXmacs on Linux with an ATI graphics card using ATI's proprietary "fglrx" driver switching to the open source "radeon" or "ati" drivers, or running the new Xgl X Server [1] might give you a significant boost in performance.
Long Story: About a year ago I bought a new system with an ATI graphics card. When I needed to use TeXmacs again, I noticed that it had become much slower (when scrolling and editing) then I was used to. I did not investigate the cause of this, I supposed TeXmacs was to blame. However, these days I tried out the new Xgl X Server [1] which is an X implementation on top of OpenGL. And all of a sudden TeXmacs performed significantly better. So I investigated further and found that the open source ATI drivers also provide a better performance in TeXmacs then the "fglrx" drivers using a standard X server. Bottomline: The "fglrx" driver has a poor 2D performance that affects TeXmacs significantly. You can work around this by either having Xgl perform the X drawing operations using the 3D API of the driver or switch to an open source X driver that has a better 2D performance. I would be interested if others can observe the same phenomenon. I could observe this under several Linux distributions using several versions of the fglrx driver. Also, do nVidia's proprietary drivers do a better job? The fact that current graphics cards are optimized for 3D operations and ATI at least does not seem to care for a decent 2D performance suggests that an OpenGL rendering backend for TeXmacs might really be worth the effort. Of course, time is short and this is a big piece of work, so we cannot expect this to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, I hope the above helps. Regards, Felix _______________________________________________ Texmacs-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/texmacs-dev
