Cairo [was: rawhide report: 20050621 changes]

[Tarjei Knapstad]

On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 14:40, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 10:26 +0200, Tarjei Knapstad wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 02:46, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 07:02 -0400, Build System wrote:
> 

<snip>

> > accelerated graphics. Those without it shouldn't notice any difference.
> 
> Don't get me wrong (and I'm not sure if you have). 

I think it might be the other way around :) (or we're both confused :))

> What I'm wanting to know is will people without hardware acceleration be
> worse off.  Are non-hw-accelerated users going to end up with a system
> that runs something like non-hw-accelerated 3D (which really sucks, even
> with a good processor)?  Or will the rendering on non-hw-accelerated
> systems be quite good, and rendering with hw-accelerated systems will be
> brilliant?
> 

What I was trying to say in the last line above was that users without
hardware accelerated graphics shouldn't notice any performance hit
compared to today. I would be highly surprised if this wasn't a design
goal in Cairo given that all hardware accelerated graphics currently
require the use of proprietary drivers (99.9% anyway...) which most of
the FOSS community seems to bark at.

Normal X window rendering should be on par or better than with current
vector drawing libraries. I can't imagine that serious performance
regressions against earlier vector drawing solutions won't be fixed
before Cairo goes live in gtk+ etc.

In short, I wouldn't worry too much.

--
Tarjei