FW: XFree86 future

 >3D is a very different case than 2D; two examples:
 >
 > - The amount of data being pushed around is much larger.
 >   At the very worst, a 2D app needs to send a few times the
 >   screen real-estate worth of pixels at 20-30-40 frames.
 >   Most apps are much less demanding. 3D applications, especially
 >   games, need to send enormous quantities of textures and vertices
 >   to the graphics card.

There are texture, vertex etc. objects. It can be cached on the card so 
there is no traffic. All modern games use this way. Because of that AGP 
8x isn't faster as AGP 4x.

 >
 > - Interaction between multiple applications is not typically
 >   a big deal. A 3D app renders into a fixed area of the screen
 >   or the whole screen and that's all. On the other hand,
 >   imagine a window manager resizing a alpha-blended dialog
 >   that overlaps another window. No matter who is pushing the
 >   bits to the graphics card, you are going to have IPC going on.

You can render to textures so that overlaping is nop problem. The OpenGL 
accelerated Quartz engine do it. There are so many ways to imrove 
performance under OpenGL that I don't understand that the XFree preople 
don't used it as there drawing API. So there must be only a one 
accelerated APi and not 2 or 3 if I call Render as one. OpenGL ES is 
subset for embedded devices so I think its the way to go.

Marco