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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I'm sorry, m8, but he was right about the 3D desktop stuff being a waste of resources.
Using the GPU to composite is reasonable, that is true, but things start going downhill once you realise that you have to shunt a framebuffer down the AGP bus for every window you want to composite. Moreover, you have to keep a framebuffer-sized chunk of memory for each window, which very rapidly can cripple a system with a limited amount of memory. It is for this reason that OSX does not favour serious users who like to keep many windows open at the same time.
So yes... Using the GPU to composite is a nice idea, but as you can see, that is counter-acted by a massive increase in the workload.
It looks even less ideal once you realise that OSX really only uses it for transparency and making the windows shrink and fade in and out.
If something worthwhile is done with Quartz, I might change my mind, but until then, it's a nice technology being used for completely the wrong thing and in the process, making performance worse than it was before.