[cairo] Feedback from the 1.3.4 snapshot

[Carl Worth]

So I've received some pretty good feedback to the 1.3.4 snapshot so
far. Benjamin Otte reports that swfdec, (a free viewer for flash
files), benefits greatly from this new snapshot. In his own words:

	<Company>       wow
	<Company>       awesome
	<Company>       1.3.4 really is fast

In more detail, he went on to say that several flash movies no longer
use up 100% if his (admittedly, only 800MHz) machine. So 1.3.4 enabled
those to be played at full-speed for the first time.

Another user, (who I think was hitting Monty's image transfer bug),
had the following to say:

	hey wow! there are worlds between 1.2.4 and 1.3.4, thank you!

So, once again, everyone that has been helping to improve the
performance of cairo so much lately should be congratulated.

Oh, and I re-ran the benchmark that Zack Rusin had mentioned here:

	http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2006/10/benchmarks.html

and posted here:

	http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/examples/cairorender.tar.bz2

He had seen Qt's software tessellator being 7, 5, and 6 times faster
than cairo for his three polygons. I compared cairo 1.3.4 to cairo
1.2.6 and found that it was 10, 4, and 4 times faster for those same
three polygons. So, Zack, thanks for pointing out this performance
bug. It looks like that piece of it is fairly well fixed now.

Now, lest we think we can just sit back, we still do have a bunch of
improvement yet to make. For example, Benjamin also mentioned that he
was delighted to see that his hardest test case could now achieve a
rate of 0.5 frames per second. I don't know how slow it was before to
make that seem impressive, but clearly we've got to do better than
that.

I'm working with Benjamin on getting a test case distilled from that
flash file into cairo's performance suite. An initial look at the
profile suggests that the biggest bottlenecks might now be in the X
server, so some attention might be needed to improving the
acceleration architecture there, (like, finally finishing up EXA or
so). More on that in the future.

But there's definitely still more we can do in cairo to improve things.

Oh, and I've also gotten feedback about a pretty bad text positioning
bug for the text nautilus is drawing on the background window. I think
that's a problem from the new banker's rounding, but I'll bring that
up in a new thread.

-Carl
--
cworth at redhat.com
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