Speeding up Xorg's RENDER
Linked by Diego Calleja on Fri 15th Apr 2005 20:49 UTC
X11, Window Managers Some Trolltech programmers are doing some optimization work in the x.org RENDER extension. RENDER has been used with COMPOSITE to make "transparency" and "shadow" effects, and its slowness has stopped it from being widely adopted. Hopefully, this optimization work will make things better, although it's not clear in the email if this addresses the "XAA sucks, someone needs to take KAA to x.org" problem which is often said to be the real problem of render slowness. RENDER is also often used to do more things, like AA fonts, so this will be good for X desktop in general.
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RE: More details here
by Lumbergh on Fri 15th Apr 2005 21:44 UTC

Thanks for the other link. Xserver still has lots of cruft that has to be ripped out. But with Xgl, Luminocity, and other things around the corner things are looking good. Oh, and with GCC 4.0 around the corner Render should get another speedup. Search around for Keith Packard and his comments about Render and GCC 4.0.

I've been playing around with Luminocity on my gentoo partition. Impressive stuff. I love how the menus fold over like a piece of paper when opening them and the expose type stuff in the workspace windows.

But the real question is how do these Render optimizations tie into the fact that ATI still hasn't exposed any functionality in their drivers for hardware acceleration ala NVidia (RenderAcceleration)?