Linked by Diego Calleja on Fri 15th Apr 2005 20:49 UTC
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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I put code where my mouth was and wrote some code and gave it off to ajax on #freedesktop.org a few weeks ago:
http://www.rasterman.com/files/blend.tar.gz
these routines should be able to be drop-in replacements for xrender's blending. i'm leaving it to others to integrate them into x's actual codebase - but this is the nuts and bolts. high-speed C and ASM routines here should cover a shunk of xrender paths and get some speedups.