Linked by Guillaume Maillard on Thu 10th Oct 2002 05:44 UTC
Being a BeOS user (a purely desktop system) and because I code under Linux, I see XFree86 (v4.1 on my machine) as a user and as a developper. And this is where the problem lies. My Gnome or KDE desktops are slow in comparison with other operating systems, but XFree86, the 'engine' behind these desktops, proves me that it's not. Let's look at what I have in front of me: a dual Pentium III at 933Mhz with 512MB of memory, a Radeon 32 AIW, a modified Mandrake 8.0 powered by kernel 2.4.18.
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DRI
Nice concept but 3D oriented, I only wanted to cover the 2D part(even if I mentioned that the 3D acceleration solve a lot of issue).
You can do 2D rendering with OpenGL. Just set an orthographic projection and use Vertex2f calls (or for instance use Interleaved arrays with one of the V2F types), draw the bitmaps as textured rectangles( with disabled mipmapping and texture filtering). Most of the GPU silicon is devoted to the 3D core and it will be a shame not to use it. I think OSX Jaguar can use OpenGL for rendering the GUI and Windows Longhorn will use DirectX.
Another DRI advantage is that most 3D accelerators (except the NVidia ones) have DRI drivers that can be easily ported to fbDRI.