On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 23:33 -0700, Allen Akin wrote: > On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 01:26:53PM -0400, David Reveman wrote: > | On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 12:03 -0400, Jon Smirl wrote: > | > In general, the whole concept of programmable graphics hardware is > | > not addressed in APIs like xlib and Cairo. This is a very important > | > point. A major new GPU feature, programmability is simply not > | > accessible from the current X APIs. OpenGL exposes this > | > programmability via its shader language. > | > | ... I don't > | see why this can't be exposed through the Render extension. ... > > What has always concerned me about this approach is that when you add > enough functionality to Render or some new X extensions to fully exploit > previous (much less current and in-development!) generations of GPUs, > you've essentially duplicated OpenGL 2.0.
I don't currently see any strong application motivation to provide this kind of functionality in a general purpose 2D API, and so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to push this into the 2D-centric X protocols either. When that changes, we'll want to explore how best to provide that functionality. One possibility is to transition applications to a pure GL drawing model, perhaps using glitz as a shim between the 2D and 3D worlds. That isn't currently practical as our GL implementations are missing several key features (FBOs, accelerated indirect rendering, per-component alpha compositing), but those things are all expected to be fixed at some point. The real goal is to provide a good programming environment for 2D applications, not to push some particular low-level graphics library. -keith
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