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

[Jon Smirl]

Don't take this as a criticism of Cairo. Cairo is an excellent piece of work. 

The existence of the 3D hardware pipeline is just a fact of life that all of us
have to live with. It is entrenched enough that it won't be significantly
changing in the foreseeable future. I'm not suggesting that Cairo follow the
OpenGL API but that it should take this hardware into account. The fact is we
only have one accelerated hardware model and Cairo simply needs to decide to
make full use of it or not. 

For example, I'd much rather describe surfaces as mathematical equations, but
you can't accelerate that. Instead I'm forced to use the much more complicated
system of triangle meshes since they can be accelerated.

--- Carl Worth <cworth at east.isi.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 08:41:28 -0700 (PDT), Jon Smirl wrote:
> > Should we step back and reconsider the API and see if the need for pbuffers
> can
> > be eliminated?
> 
> API suggestions are always welcome. All cairo API decisions have come
> about through discussion on the cairo mailing list.
> 
> If someone can point at something in the public cairo API that is
> intrinsically "hard" for OpenGL, then we'll be glad to take a closer
> look at it.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> That's a possible approach. But that's not cairo.
> 
> -Carl

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


	
		
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