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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> this talk about vsync, and I still don't understand exactly what it is. and Eugenia, post a video about it
I can't post a video. This feature CANNOT be seen on a video that will have less than 75-85 frames per second!! And most videos only have between 10-29 frames per second! This is why we say you can't understand it until you see it with your own eyes!
BUT.
There is a way to understand it, with a little experiement.
Take this browser window (not maximized) and drag it around the screen. Don't do it too fast, but not too slow either. Just at the speed that you always move windows around to re-arrange them on your desktop. You will see that when you are dragging a window, you can't really read what it is written in the page, because it all becomes grabled.
Now, take a book in front of you and open it in a page that it has two full pages of being written. Keep that book open, at the same distance of your eyes that your monitor is, and drag it around in front of your eyes as you did with the browser window!
You will see that while reading the book has become harder now that you are moving it, however, its movement and character-reading is much more smooth than the browser window!
This is the difference between a VSYNC'ed desktop and a non-VSCYNC'ed one. It makes the desktop overall smoother!! It is not, of course, about trying to read moving windows, this was an experiement to understand the smoothness!
I hope this test made it easier to understand the feature.