[Mesa3d-dev] Re: Using OpenGL as a window manager

[Jon Smirl]

--- Martijn Sipkema <msipkema at sipkema-digital.com> wrote:
> I'm not saying clients should use PutImage for rendering. In fact
> I think clients should use only OpenGL/GLX for rendering. I also
> think that transparent windows is a hard thing to do right (and
> maybe not even that useful), let alone transformed windows
> (which really aren't useful at all).

Of course transformed windows aren't useful in any GUI you currently use. That's
because none are designed to take advantage of them. I'd withhold my opinion for
a couple of years and watch how the GUI evolves. 

The potential of GPU coprocessing has not been exploited at all yet. Longhorn,
OS-X, and xserver are just the first generation GUIs that are trying to use it.
What the final GUI will look like five years from now is anyone's guess. 

GPU coprocessing is much, much faster than the existing implementations. Some
benchmarks I've looked at run as much as 100x faster. A two order of magnitude
speed change is definitely going to change how GUI software is written.

Think about it, if your 3Ghz CPU was running at 300Ghz next year we would see
radical changes in the software we run. Or look at it the other way, 30Mhz,
that's about the speed an Intel 286 chip runs at. What to go back to using that?

One thing I am certain of is that if MS and Apple have an evolved coprocessor
GUIs five years from now and Linux doesn't, that's going to be very bad news for
Linux acceptance on the desktop.

=====
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at yahoo.com


	
		
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