Rasterman's New Toy: EVAS

renai42 writes: "Rasterman gave a very interesting speech about his new EVAS canvas software at Linux.conf.au this week. This LinuxToday.com.au article gives a fair idea of the gist of the speech. EVAS is interesting stuff for the Linux community - a hardware accelerated X desktop with anti-aliased fonts and alpha blending." They've been claiming that the next Enlightenment will be the fastest WM around thanks mostly to EVAS.

Totally Offtopic Side Note 1: I find it amusing that LinuxToday.com.au snatched my X icon: I always thought it was probably the crappiest Slashdot icon, and I never dreamed anyone would want to take it. My policy on Slashdot Icons has always been steal whatever ones you like, but credit us when you use 'em, and its not a big deal, but its just funny to see who takes what.)

Totally offtopic sidenote 2: while we're talking about toys, check out Jubei, my MAME front end I've been poking on in my enormous amounts of free time.

Comments

Enlightenment -- fast?

[ajs]

So, the idea is that Enlightenment will be fast because the tons of junk that it does will be hardware-accelerated? Wouldn't it be logical, then to assume that all of the other window managers out there that are faster than Enlightenment (Sawfish, fvwm{,2}, twm, etc, etc,) will be even faster than Enlightenment given the same hardware acceleration?

Sawfish seems to me to be about 2-10 times faster (purely subjective) than Enlightenment. Can that gap be bridged by hardware? Of course, but it still doesn't make E efficient.

Re:Windows vs. XFree86 & WM's

[drig]

X uses the same hardware acceleration that windows does. For instance, most modern video cards can draw basic primitives (like squares, lines, etc), and copy portions of the screen in hardware. X will use all of this. It's called the X11 Acceleration Architecture (XAA). /var/log/xdm.errors should show if you have XAA installed and working. Raster's software will use acceleration no one else does. For instance, using 3D acceleration to do pixmap resizing and alpha blending. Basically, rasterman is finding areas that could be used to speed up enlightenment that other people havne't thought of yet.