Getting anti-aliasing right

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 00:37 -0500, jonsmirl at gmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Corbin Simpson
> <mostawesomedude at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I should have been clearer. This is like compiz, where non-transformed
> > viewports look perfect and transformed viewports look illegible. Nobody
> > appears to have a problem with this for compiz; why should Wayland have
> > anything different?
> 
> If Wayland ends up as our graphics foundation it may be with us for 20
> years.  This is a known problem and it can be fixed with some
> planning.  Isn't the goal of Wayland to have pixel perfect graphics?
> 
> Glyph generation inside the CPU is certainly going to happen in that
> time frame. You can already do it today on decent GPUs. We are very
> close to be able to run the entire compositor and scene graph engine
> inside the GPU.  You want to plan for these things in the architecture
> so that we don't have to rip everything up again in five years.
> Today's high end GPU will be the low end GPU of 2015.

GPU-based glyph generation is entirely orthogonal to preserving optimal
anti-aliasing under window transformations.  You can do GPU-based glyph
rendering now, in X (I seem to recall Zack Rusin blogging about it a
couple of years ago), and you can do optimal anti-aliasing under
transformations without GPU-based glyph generation.

I'm not sure that you *can* solve the optimal anti-aliasing problem
without introducing deep knowledge of application rendering into
Wayland, something which is an explicit anti-goal.
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