Slashdot Mirror
Xgl Developer Calls it Quits
nosoupforyou writes "Jon Smirl, one of two main developers for Xgl and Xegl (a version of X layered on top of OpenGL and rendering directly to the linux framebuffer, similar to Apple's Quartz Extreme) is calling it quits. Citing two years of effort without pay, a shortage of interest from developers, and no hope of release for more than a year, Jon is moving on."
Read why the xgl guy is leaving. He says it is because of exa and because more demand for exa.
Now, guess who created exa. That's right. A Trolltech employee who they hired to work on X.
I think you might be comparing apples and oranges, no? EXA stands for eyecandy X architecture, which is "based on KAA (KDrive acceleration architecture) it's designed to be an alternative to the currently used XAA (XFree86 acceleration architecture) with better acceleration of XRender which is used by composite managers for desktop eyecandy effects."
XGL is "an X-Server layered on top of OpenGL."
"The way things are heading is completely drop support for 2d acceleration and build a userspace X server that runs completely on a extended (currently EGL) OpenGL api. That way any OS that has any support for OpenGL, even if it's just thru a ported Mesa software rendering library, can run the X server."
And if you were financially contributing to the developers in question they might give a crap what you think they should be doing.
If you havent noticed, open source software doesnt exist just to give you what you want.
Here it is presented a way to not just only GPU accelerate the rasterisation but also the tessalation of the vector primitives.
t m.pdf
link:
www.loria.fr/~levy/publications/papers/2005/VTM/v
abstract:
"This paper presents VTMs (Vector Texture Maps), a novel representation of vector images that can be used as a texture by the GPU for real-time rendering. A VTM decomposes texture space into different regions, represented in an analytic way, by a set of implicit degree 3 polynomials. Each region can be rendered by a different fragment shading function. Accurate anti-aliasing is performed in real-time, based on an estimate of fragment coverage. As a consequence, infinite zooming can be applied without any pixel discretization artifact. Based on a hierarchical data structure, our representation has low memory requirements. Its versatility is demonstrated in various settings, including a font engine completely implemented in the GPU."
Well, that would be the "sufficently complex shader program" then. Quite useful looking, if you've got a modern GPU - maybe good way to encode quite complicated surface details without megabytes upon megabytes of bitmapped textures.
But: that paper doesn't actually deal with how to do subpixelling on-GPU with shaders, only antialiasing of the "vector-texture-maps": though in principle, and, hey, as previously stated, subpixelling (i.e. treating ordered red, green and blue subpixels as separate luma pixels for rendering for extra-sharp discontinuities such as the edges of fonts) should be possible with an even more complex shader - antialiasing and subpixeling are related, but one tends to makes fonts blurrier and the other sharper!
P.S. would it have killed you to use the <URL:http://example/com> tag for your link? See the "URLs" example right below the comment box!