On 3/7/07, Eero Tamminen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Err. Translucency means compositing and keeping the composited items in memory. Due to additional memory accesses needed for this, it would be slower (and take more memory) regardless of how "accelerated" it would be.
Keeping the composited items in memory is not necessary. After you composite, you can (and often) just keep the final result around. It is true that certain applications may cache the intermediate surfaces to optimize performance, but that's where the hardware acceleration comes in. If we had it, we might not need to keep those intermediate surfaces around as much, and thus you would actually use _less_ memory if you had hardware acceleration. So, I don't buy that translucency implies increased memory use to the point that the additional performance from hardware accelerated graphics is overshadowed.
You can see this even on Desktop, just ask how many gamers are happy with integrated graphics cards which share memory with the rest of the system instead of having (hundreds of megs) of their own memory in which to store textures etc. and in where the operations can be done without loading the memory bus of the rest of the system (downside is that all this costs, adds to the computer power consumption & heating). :-)
I don't totally agree here either. It sounds like you're saying that the hardware acceleration won't get you much unless you have dedicated video memory. Here's a counter-example: the macbook uses an integrated graphics card to do all of its fancy accelerated UI effects, including translucency. Yes, the macbook is not a gaming machine, but that's not the issue, here. The issue is that hardware-accelerated graphics enable advanced user interfaces, even w/out dedicated video memory. Dan _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list [email protected] https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
