AntiAliased text on X [was code bloat]

[Kendall Bennett]

Adam Jackson <ajax at nwnk.net> wrote:

> On Monday 01 November 2004 18:38, Kendall Bennett wrote:
> > Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com> wrote:
> > IMHO that is mostly because X.org and all projects above it do anti-
> > aliasing via RENDER, which requires hardware alpha blending. Doing alpha
> > blending in software is really slow. I am pretty sure that Windows does
> > cheap anti-aliased fonts without needing hardware ALPHA blending by
> > breaking down the glyph into multiple layers of shaded pixels. If you
> > have say 8 levels of shading, then you decompose each glyph into 7
> > different mono bitmaps, each one representing the pixels that need to be
> > drawn in each of the shaded colors. Then you draw them over the top of
> > each other with transparency as mono bitmaps, and voila! Anit-aliased
> > text.
> >
> > We do that in our SciTech MGL library (I forget exactly how many levels
> > we use in the MGL) and FreeType has always been able to generate these
> > types of multi-layer glyphs. For machines with hardware alpha blending
> > (and drivers that support it ;-), doing it that way is probably fast
> > enough and looks good. But for slower hardware or older hardware, this
> > can be done very fast using the existing mono blit hardware used for
> > regular text. Sure it would be 7x slower than regular text, but *WAY*
> > faster than any blending done in software to the framebuffer.
> 
> Interesting.  I'm curious whether this would be faster in the
> shadowfb case.  Software Render is slow largely because
> framebuffer reads are slow.  I can get nearly-acceptable Composite
> performance on old nasty PCI cards with no Render accel just by
> turning off XAA and turning on shadowfb. 
> 
> KAA is much closer to a shadowfb model than XAA.

Yes, but you can't have both. You either have hardware acceleration to 
the framebuffer or you have a shadow buffer. Clearly a shadow buffer will 
speed any any type of operation that needs framebuffer reads, but for 
most drivers this is not necessary except for blending.

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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