Bob: > I used the wrong name. Render is the undesirable extension then > for a "thin profile" of graphics adapter - for performance the > graphics acceleration needs to be near the display, whereas for > a stateless thin client it is not. Once upon a time Render was > largely only used when available, now more and more > functionality seems to depend upon it being available.
I am not aware of anything in GNOME that requires Xrender. The lack of it does affect performance, but it is not strictly required. Otherwise, GNOME programs would not work on Sparc with Xsun (where Xrender is not present). Note that the Firefox team has been working on improving some of the cairo performance issues that show up with Xrender is not present. There has been some debate recently about whether this work is a "waste of time" since our long-term plan seems to be to move towards using Xorg on Sparc, which supports Xrender and we understand SRSS is moving towards Xorg with Xrender as well. However, if it is valuable to SRSS to improve performance of GNOME without Xrender, then this is a stronger argument that such work isn't a "waste of time". Brian
