[cairo] Re: [Mesa3d-dev] Points in Cairo Glitz paper

[Jon Smirl]

--- David Reveman <c99drn at cs.umu.se> wrote:
> Offscreen rendering is important for cairo. Without offscreen rendering
> cairo_surface_create_similar will not work and we can't do much else
> than drawing trapezoids and composite surfaces efficiently. This is why
> we haven't focused that much on supporting old hardware without pbuffer
> support.

But this is getting to my core point. Do we want offscreen rendering to be
important to Cairo, or should we redesign Cairo to not need it? Anyway you slice
it a system that requires pbuffers is going to be slower that one that doesn't.
Should we step back and reconsider the API and see if the need for pbuffers can
be eliminated? I'm sure that some of the people in the Mesa group can suggest
ways to eliminate them and make things map better to existing 3D hardware
without sacrificing drawing flexibility or quality.

I think that it is very important for Cairo to exactly map on to the existing 3D
pipeline as efficiently as possible. That pipeline is already installed in
millions of machines and MS is going to make sure it gets installed in millions
more. My tendency would be to start from the 3D hardware model and work
backwards to the 2D API. I agree that this will probably result in a more
complex 2D API but the performance gains from doing this are worth it.

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


	
		
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