EXA

[Michel Dänzer]

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 10:35 +0300, sshachar at t2.technion.ac.il wrote:
> Quoting Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org>:
> 
> > On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:38:38 +0300, wrote:
> > > heavy use of antialiased fonts and transparency, however even when I
> > exposed
> > > the full set of EXA functionality (e.g. always returning TRUE for check
> > > composite) antialiased font rendering doesn't seem to be passed down to
> > HW.
> > 
> > One problem here that is specific to glyphs is that the server does
> > not use currently Pixmaps for the glyphs, (instead it uses chunks of
> > system memory), so no EXA acceleration is possible for the font
> > rendering.
> > 
> > I'm currently working on a patch to make the server use Pixmaps for
> > glyph storage which I hope to be able to share soon. Then we'll be
> > able to see if that helps.
> 
> And without antialiasing fonts ARE rendered using offscreen pixmaps?
> 
> Anyway, I don't get it.. I thought EXA was introduced mainly to accelerate this
> case. I have a scenario in which the CPU is slow and is heavily loaded, while
> my gfx card is snappy. My goal is to spread the load more evenly and pass as
> much workload as possible away from the main CPU. Your'e telling me I can't do
> this with modern desktops in X at all?

I think at least part of anti-aliased text rendering should already be
accelerated now, and this definitely doesn't explain why you aren't
seeing almost any other calls to your acceleration hooks. Have you
verified that EXA considers your pixmaps 'offscreen'?


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |          http://tungstengraphics.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer