[cairo] anti-aliasing quality in glitz/OpenGL vs. Cairo native rasterization?

[Carl Worth]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:18:50 +0200, Leon Woestenberg wrote:
> > Do you have a target platform in mind already?
> > 
> Altera Stratix FPGA with an softcore embedded NIOS II 32-bit processor.
> Plan: start off with everything in C, profile and then do incremental
> software/hardware partition.

That sounds like the right plan. Eric Anholt might have some useful
insights as I watched him start profiling simple cairo applications this
week as he looked to see what else he could do in the ATI/Render support
to speed things up. David Reveman and Peter Nilsson might also be useful
resources as they have been accelerating cairo via OpenGL.

> I need to get into VHDL/FPGA/logic design again, only barely touched the
> topic with a single course and a single hands-on training.

It sounds like you've got a lot to learn, but then, that is why it's
called school. I hope you can have lots of fun with this.

> > Our current software for that is in libpixman, but we've designed a new
> > specification that we haven't implemented yet.
> > 
> There is some initial reading for me to do.

Well, I don't think we've actually written down that specification
yet. :-}

All I was trying to point out is that there are some pieces of the
current implementation that we plan to throw away. So, it would be wise
to give us a heads-up before you spent significant amounts of effort to
understand/accelerate something that might get discarded.

> I noticed the current source code is not annotated by comment. Is there
> any interest in having the code commented as I will probably start doing
> so for my own good.

Yes, comments can be helpful anywhere the meaning of the code is not
clear in and of itself. I tend to add them when I have to go back and
maintain code that I wrote a while back, and find that I don't
understand it immediately.

-Carl