[cairo] cairo Win32 backend and acceleration

Maarten Bosmans mkbosmans at gmail.com
Wed Mar 16 13:24:10 PDT 2011


2011/3/16 Thorgrimsson, Chris <Chris.Thorgrimsson at lamresearch.com>:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> I am trying to figure out once and for all if the Win32 backend for cairo
> gains any form of hardware acceleration since it sits atop GDI(does it?).
> This all stems from a web article that I came across that would seem to
> indicate that it does use the GPU (if available) in some cases. I guess I
> figured that without using some form of GL backend, I wasn’t getting any GPU
> benefit and it was all CPU based.

Not really an answer to your question, but in my experience the cairo
image backend (using pixman, thus entirely in software) is much faster
than the win32 gdi backend.

> Here are the articles I am referring to. Both articles are long but I found
> them pretty informative.
>
>
>
> Part 1 of the article
> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2d-windows-gdi,2539.html
>
> Part 2 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2d-windows-gdi,2547.html
>
>
>
> I guess I would classify myself as a cairo “user” and not a “developer”. I
> haven’t dug into its internals, so I am unfamiliar with how it interfaces
> with GDI, if at all. Any feedback that can shed light on my acceleration
> question is much appreciated.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Chris

Maarten


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