Re: Snappy GUI response

On Fri, 2003-07-04 at 20:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 11:05:04AM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote: 
> >    I advocate backing pixmaps for as many windows as it 
> > makes sense, and no expose events on them.  Not only is this
> > extremely fast even if server is rendering in software, but
> > it looks great (you don't see redrawing).  That is, save all
> > your expensive rendering, don't keep redrawing it.  Put it in
> > a pixmap and set it as the window background.  There's also
> > a good change this pixmap will end up in video ram rather than 
> > system ram.
> 
> As I understand it this is pretty much what OS X does - it just keeps
> around the contents of every window. You have to do this anyway to
> implement alpha-blended windows, from what people have said.
> 
> It might be possible to more or less implement this in toolkits (the
> "keep pixmap for all windows" thing, not the alpha thing).  It could
> also be done in the server presumably.

Owen mentioned XDirectFB, and I recommend trying it out to those
complaining about lack of snappiness. Even having no hardware
acceleration at all for my card, I found it to be very snappy when I did
a while ago.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer   \  Debian (powerpc), XFree86 and DRI developer
Software libre enthusiast  \     http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer