Re: RENDER ext. & hardware acceleration, libart integration

Around 8 o'clock on Aug 21, Peter Kaczowka wrote:

> If MMX is already being used in Render or has already tried, I'm sorry to
> imply that no one has thought of this before.

It has been tried with no effect on performance.  As I said, current 
processors have no optimizations for AGP/PCI read cycles when running in 
write-combining mode, each one is a completely separate synchronous 
transaction.

There is a small speedup available on 16-bit frame buffers by reading 
32-bits at a time, but that will become less important as more people 
migrate to 24-bit displays.

Some people are successfully implementing significant Render acceleration 
with hardware; that's clearly the right direction to go.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab