[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#15055) RFC: Cairo to replace the canvas functions

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=15055 >

Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa wrote:

>>- Potential hardware acceleration.  Cairo is designed specifically with
>>backend hardware acceleration (through opengl/glitz) in mind.  Support
>>for this is very weak at the moment, but becuase cairo is actively
>>maintained and soon to be put into production use I doubt it will remain
>>so.  Once the glitz backend is effectively working and well-supported,
>>we could get hardware acceleration *for free* in the gtk backend, or
>>with a minimum of extra glue in the other backends.
> 
> 
> I wouldn't count on getting good hardware acceleration, given the past
> record of XRender, gdk-pixbuf et all. To me it seems like either
> hardware acceleration is designed in and present from the onset, or it
> is nigh impossible to retrofit properly later.

Cairo and xrender (unlike gdk-pixbuf) were both designed with hardware 
acceleration in mind.  But the backend code for each is not well 
implemented, largely because they both run mostly on linux systems which 
generally don't have good hardware acceleration (because of driver 
problems).

-jason