Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 1st Jul 2002 17:50 UTC
David Dawes is maybe the most active XFree86 developer and he is also the lead founder of the project. He works for Tungsten Graphics, which is the main company working on the XFree, DRI and Mesa codebases today. We are happy to host an interview with David, discussing the present and future of XFree86 project. Update: Still confused how a VSYNCed desktop look like? Read here.
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The Amiga didn't just have a VSYNC interrupt - what Amigans called "double buffering", PC people called "page flipping", while what PC people call "double buffering" Amiga people called "massive waste of precious graphics memory bandwidth".
Rather than copying memory into each buffer, the amiga just changed the display hardware's pointer into graphics memory every frame, and to animate, you just need to copy into each frame the deltas from frame-2 instead of frame-1...
Only some gfx cards on the PC can do this. A minimal prerequisite for decent, smooth, animation is VSYNC support. Page-flipping stops you wasting massive amounts of bus bandwidth.
That's one reason amiga could do smooth, guaranteed 50/60 fps animation in 1986 - it avoided superfluous memcpys wherever possible. It helped that it had a display-synchronised graphics coprocessor and hardware blitter of course...