Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 08:21:43PM -0500, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Alan Cox wrote:
> 
> > > totally unusable. For example, if you run certain games on an XFree86
> > > server without hardware acceleration, it pretty much locks up the X
> > > server due to the slowness of the software GL.
> >
> > Note that the game itself _can_ figure out what GL is there. Also thats
> > an X server bug. Ditto the same problem with continual 2D handling. If
> > X was a bit smarter about how it scheduled multiple clients it could
> > minimise this problem a fair bit
> 
> And it is not really necessary for the game to know the difference between
> software and hardware GL. All it has to do is to suspend itself with an
> appropriate dialog box if it notices it cannot render more than 5 frames
> per second. A simple watchdog thread can do it without disruption of the
> main code. This can even be automated in GL library - frames can be
> detected by checking when buffers are swapped.

IMHO this is only an X server bug if it fails to deliver input events to
the client (to allow the user to quit the app). Otherwise, I belive the bug
is in the app for allowing itself to run at such a low framerate. In my
experience the X server will deliver the events ... eventually :)

I also do not think that that the GL library is an appropriate place to 
perform the framerate checks as a lot of GL apps do not redraw the screen
continuously like video games generally do. Plus, most games are _already_
calculating the framerate in the main loop as they need the information to
perform framerate independent animation.

-- 
Jason Hall