Making Wayland Game-friendly

[Graham Cantin]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > So, basically I'm hoping that Wayland can fix this issue by allowing a
>> > resolution change to be associated with a single window.
>>
>> Could you expound on how you think Wayland should behave in this
>> situation?
>>
>> Bryce
>
> I think basically, similar to windows. So, in the API call that sets the resolution, allow an optional parameter which takes the ID of the window. If the window does not have focus (or ceases to exist), restore the previous resolution. I don't really know how Wayland works so I can't really suggest much more than that.
>
> I do have another idea, but whether it would work in practice I'm not sure, so I'll just throw this out there. What if, instead of changing the native resolution, Wayland allocated an off-screen buffer of the requested resolution. As far as the app is concerned it's rendering to a fullscreen window at the requested res, but then Wayland scales the offscreen buffer and blits it to the screen. If the window loses focus then it's minimized. (I know we are sort of stumbling onto WM territory here, I'm not really sure how to handle that. Perhaps it doesn't need to be minimized just displayed non-fullscreen).
>
> Sorry if I'm talking rubbish, I only have basically knowledge of how this stuff works.
>
> Luke.

I second that blitting to fit behavior: LCDs like being driven in
their native resolution; and we can do much much nicer stretches with
shaders than the hardware scaler in some displays can.
Please consider this as an *upgrade* to windows' behavior.

IIRC, on win7, either modern nvidia or modern ati drivers (forget
which) have something similar to this; always keeping native
resolution output to the display and shader-scaling the framebuffer
resolution up.

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