Slashdot Mirror
Translucent Windows for X using OpenGL
Anonymous Coward writes "Take a look at this! This guy is working on an OpenGL backend for X. But he needs pizza and some new hardware. He's on a TNT2 for heaven sake!"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Everybody seems to be obsessed with all this "3D-accelerated desktop" stuff but IMHO it's all overrated.
Using OpenGL will not automatically make everything faster. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some things become slower. OpenGL is good for 3D stuff, but sucks for 2D stuff. Ever tried blitting in OpenGL? Slooooooooow. And guess what? Most applications use 2D drawing primitives.
The biggest performance bottlenecks are, and have always been: 1) the driver 2) the kernel.
2 has already been addressed (my system flies with these patches; it's even faster than Windows!). The upcoming 2.6 kernel will be amazing.
1 remains a problem. X's architecture doesn't cause the slowness, it's all in the driver! If the driver doesn't implement all OpenGL features then you'll still be stuck with slow drawing speed (or maybe even slower, since emulating OpenGL is slow beyond imagination. ever tried running TuxRacer in plain non-accelerated Mesa?)
If I'm not mistaken, recent Windows use the 3D acceleration to draw all 2D operations, which means they can accelerate everything. I'd love to see XFree do the same thing. Really, this is more than a nice hack.
This is being discussed here.
Mirror List
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
This is the way to go for eyecandy, using the Hardware, which lies unused when in a 2D session. I've been waiting for something like this quite some time now. Good thing it's here now.
But there's still work to do. Note that the windows are translucent all across, borders and all.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Anyone looking at the framebuffer device as salvation is barking up the wrong tree. Yes, its direct to hardware, but it's slow as molasses when there's anything happening on the screen. Try running a console-intensive app on a fbconsole and watch the latency of all your apps go through the roof. I can't even play an MP3 when the framebuffer is busy, and I have a top-end system with optimized software.
XFree86 has direct-to-hardware rendering, it has DRI and MITSHM. Granted it uses a few more megs of memory than I'd like it too, it's our best bet for 2D performance out there. It really is quite good, I think a lot of the desktop environments need optimization (KDE is a bad performer all-around, IMO).
The framebuffer exists for three reasons:
1. Simple to program for.
2. Needed for 68k and most PPC machines (no native console mode)
3. Platform Independent.
it doesnt:
1. Perform well enough for casual use.
2. Play well with others.
3. Run X programs without the overhead of X anyway.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I know of one very good application for this.
It seems like everyone on slashdot is only looking for reasons it is useful to them. Put away your icr and web browsing thoughts for a minute.
Let's think broader. Lets think about the commercial use for a feature such as true transparency. I currently develop Air Traffic Control software for the US. I work on the display software that had to be written with the MOX (multiple overlay extenstion) extension to X. But we needed to have a vendor deveop a very expensive card to actualy be able to do the transparency. We have requirments to display the tracks (aircrafts) over anything else on the display. All of our windows therefor have to be truly transparent because they all have a different visual priority. I belive there are many other commercial uses for this too in real time monitoring. If there was linux support for this there would be a much bigger push to develop some of these big money project on linux boxes. This would be a major cost saver for software companies and a big boost for linux.
IMO