rawhide report: 20050621 changes

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 10:46 +1000, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 07:02 -0400, Build System wrote:
> 
> > cairo-0.5.1-1
> > -------------
> > * Mon Jun 20 2005 Kristian Høgsberg <krh at redhat.com> 0.5.1-1
> > - Update to cairo 0.5.1.
> > - Remove gtk-doc files, since --disable-gtk-doc doesn't work.
> > - Disable gtk-doc and add freetype and fontconfig BuildRequires.
> 
> I'm curious to know what cairo means in terms of performance for users.
> 
> I've read some really good stuff about it, but it all seems to rely on
> "taking advantage of display hardware acceleration when available (eg.
> through the X Render Extension or OpenGL)" (to quote from the
> cairographics.org web site).
> 
> What does this mean for users without hardware acceleration?
> What does this mean for users with NVIDIA and ATI cards who don't have
> support for 3D rendering because current open source drivers aren't
> offering support for this?
> 
> Given that gtp+-2.7.x (and beyond) is going to rely on Cairo for
> rendering, I'd really appreciate it if someone in the know could give a
> heads up on what this means for all users (since most of the focus
> (media wise) seems to look at hardware accelerated environments).

In general, with Cairo, if you render the same things as without 
Cairo, it goes through the same code path as before. 

(You can update to rawhide GTK+ and try it out ... it's still early
and there is lots of performance work left to do, but my experience
is that it isn't hugely slower.)

If you have a fancy theme with alpha-transparency, gradients, etc,
it will, not surprisingly, be slower than a completely flat and
plain theme, at least for now.

Eventually, Cairo will allow harnessing more of the capabilities
of recent graphics hardware: without Cairo fancy graphics is
all software rendering (and different for every app), with Cairo,
we have the ability to accelerate in a single code path.

Regards,
						Owen

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