Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Sep 2003 20:37 UTC
Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.
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Doom ran in about 320x240 with 8bit colour.
It wasn't until we got SIMD (MMX) that we could move past 8bit colour. Because it took too much time to move colour blocks around in the x86. Most o this moving was relegated to the video card if it could do it. This is why back then it really payed to have a good driver for your video card, and video acceleration was important. Also with the ISA bus things moved really slowly. You wouldn't want a 1024x768 screen on ISA.
Today your screen is at least 1024x768 with 24 o 32 bit colour and it requires a lo of processing to move all of that data around escpecially if you use special effects such as alpha blending. The x86 series processors are not designed for such a job but video card processors are. Now you could write a good 2D card driver for every video card but it is hard because there is no standard.
OpenGL is a standard and you can use it to do 2D. So just write all your stuff for OpenGL and use the supplied OpenGL driver that comes with the video card. This way any card that has OpenGL support can do complex 2D graphics without having to send some of it back to the x86 processor because of lack of support.