Re: DRI integration

Around 15 o'clock on Nov 13, Brian Paul wrote:

> I'm still wondering which primitive X operations (like blitting or 
> text rendering, etc) might be difficult to map onto GL in your opinion.

Oh yeah, if I recall correctly, GL doesn't allow me to copy pixels within a
single object.  That's a problem for applications which don't repaint for
scrolling.  For 2D graphics, this is really *the* performance limiting 
operation; nothing else is "too slow" in software today.  Frankly, a 
simple bitblt primitive without even a rasterop would be more than 
sufficient here.

Text isn't too bad; certainly we could make it a lot faster if we 
provided some level of acceleration, but realistically, you draw text by 
constructing a composite image from the individual glyphs, uploading that 
to the graphics card and using it as a mask for rendering.  Simple AA (and 
non-AA) text are probably going to be plenty fast with regular GL 
operations.  Again, per-component composited text will either require 
software rendering (which runs about 50000 glyphs/sec today) or extensions 
at the bottom of the GL pipeline.

-keith