Re: Snappy GUI response

On Fri, 2003-07-04 at 21:07, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
>   I see alot of people saying "things would be fast if we only
> had this, or that", but I know that's not going to change anything.
> Direct rendered 2D doesn't solve the event problem.  I'm pretty
> convinced that the synchronization issues will make it worse.
> We don't direct render 3D so that window moves will be smoother;
> it has quite the opposite effect.  Adding more complete
> acceleration will help, but the core problem is still there:
> people don't seem to know how to write apps to take advantage
> of what X has to offer. 

There seems to be four classes of problems: 

slow repaint in response to repaint events: slow on linux 2.4.* because
of high latency

"jerky" repaint in response to windows resizes: due to the same reason
as above, and no syncronization with the windows managers redraw.

slow redraw on scrolling in some heavy apps, eg. mozilla (or java): due
to complex rendering pipeline which is not accelerated properly with
current drivers.

all other problems (without going into details)

Am I missing something?

It seems that macos X handles the first by doing the equivalent of
backing store / save under, and that the second one can be solved by
doing a combination of the macos way and double buffering. If the third
problem could be solved by better driver support, then the concept of
saving window content and doing synced double buffered redraws should
maybe be examined further.

-- 
-Torgeir