Trolltech's Zack Rusin
today introduced Glucose on Freedesktop Xorg mailing list. Glucose is a new "OpenGL based acceleration architecture" that "uses XGL code". It does not require any change on the drivers side, except a call to glucoseDriverInit.
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Member since:2005-07-13
Member since:2006-03-20
AIGLX allows the server to do OpenGL rendering, which means that window managers can use OpenGL to do cool effects without pulling the images down from the server, playing around with them, then copying them into DRI memory as textures and displaying them. Instead, window managers can use an X pixmap as a GL texture directly, and tell the X server to do all the GL manipulations on it.
As you can imagine, this makes GL drawing using pixmaps a hell of a lot more efficient, but doesn't actually do too much to accelerate the GL drawing.
Then again, Glucose won't necessarily make things all that much faster, since 2d drawing isn't actually all that much slower than 3d (and, in fact, on many cards it might be faster -- you don't have to handle all those pesky 3d transformations), but it _does_ mean that you don't have to do context switching between 2d and 3d, and it also means you don't have 2d drivers anymore. This means that the X developers can work much harder on good 3d drivers, with less code to worry about, which means more performance and less bugs.
Good for all of us =)
Member since:
2005-07-08
I read this as an acceleration architecture that bridges the AIGLX server to use the XGL rendering paths. Is this right? I thought that AIGLX already takes care of OpenGL acceleration. If it doesn't, than what does it do?
So, can anyone make this situation any clearer?