[cairo] Where's the bottleneck in using glitz/cairo/librsvg?

[Keith Packard]

On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 12:09 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> With the little study I'm doing of where GNOME is deployed [1], it's
> becoming very clear that the great majority of *users* are thin clients.
> I haven't figured out if it's mostly X-terminal-as-thin-client, or
> VNC-as-thin-client-with-X-server-in-a-central-fat-box.

If they're closed-source X terminals, things will suck. If they're LTSP
boxes, things will be fine. I know of several huge LTSP deployments
running Gnome, I haven't heard of large scale deployments with
proprietary X terminals though. 

> In the first case, X terminals very rarely support the RENDER extension.
> In the second case, a VNC-like scheme just pushes pixels.  In either
> case we get no benefit from client-side hardware acceleration.  So we
> need a really good software-only renderer to make this usable at all for
> big deployments. 

Yeah, decent software rendering is a requirement. I suspect we're going
to have to compromise on precision to get performance at an acceptable
level though; no-one has come up with a fast point-sampled AA rasterizer
yet. Perhaps we can go with analytic coverage for a non-tesselating
rasterizer; I fear that this will only cause higher level applications
pain though.

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com
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