Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

Around 18 o'clock on Mar 24, Allen Akin wrote:

> Keith was willing to address the UI folks' requests fairly directly, even
> if some of the resulting features couldn't be supported by the hardware or
> involved infrastructure differing from what was developed for OpenGL.  That
> wasn't true for a lot of us in the OpenGL community.

I tried to strike a balance between what hardware I knew about provided and
what 2D applications were already busily doing in software.  Given that I
also wanted to migrate rendering across the wire for networked use,
providing software implementations of rendering operations needed by
applications will end up a net win in performance.

Even still, I think nearly all of Render matches the hardware pretty well; 
it's a tiny little extension, providing image compositing and primitive 
geometric objects and not a whole lot else.  I'd be interested to know 
what areas are broken so that we can explore how best to fix them.

> The question I'd raise now is whether the UI folks (and for that matter,
> other users of X11) understand where graphics hardware programmability
> is going.

I'm not sure a lot of them have that kind of experience.  I think it's part
of my job to figure out the hardware, and work with application developers 
to try and map what they want with what the hardware does.  Sometimes the 
there's quite an impedence mismatch, and we're left with either not doing 
something or providing a software implementation and wondering if someday 
the hardware will support it.

> If so, it may still be possible for the GL world and other graphics worlds
> to share important infrastructure (resource management, data formats,
> high-performance datapaths, etc.).

That would help everyone.  Right now, the X 2D world is completely separate
from the 3D world, and resource management (at least in the DRI drivers) is
not exactly cooperative.

Data formats are currently compatible; but with pixels moving to floating 
point, we'll have to update a lot of infrastructure.

-keith