idea: display drivers

[Reece Dunn]

On 7 February 2010 15:02, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Emmanuel's code is available from Sourceforge.  It is a good starting
>> point for this.  If you want, send me what you have so far for testing
>> purposes.  It would be great to have a native MacOSX windowing system.
>>
>> James McKenzie
>>
>
> The design of the old quartz driver is not correct. I remember that
> Alexandre commented that a lot of code which was in it doesn't make
> sense for a quartz driver but only for X11. Before a quartz driver can
> be written we really need a dib engine. It will make writing another
> driver much easier and much more code would be shared.
>
> Thinking a few steps further I also think that at some point the
> current X11 driver needs to be redesigned for modern windows version
> (we would get a classic winex11 and a modern one). The modern one
> would in my opinion only be responsible for creating windows, font
> rendering but the rest would all be done using OpenGL. This way the
> rendering code could also work on OSX and only window management stuff
> would be needed.

In general, this seems to be the best approach. I do have a few
questions, though:

  1/  Does this mean that OpenGL is required for all GDI calls, not
just D3D? If so, it will exclude people who don't have OpenGL support
(e.g. are using the vesa, nv, or nouveau drivers).

  2/  What will the performance of GDI32 calls be like? There are
various comments that the Vista architecture does not optimise GDI32
calls, so applications that use these are slower.

References:
 * http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/vista_vs_xp_tests/
 * http://blogs.msdn.com/nickkramer/archive/2006/04/07/571162.aspx
(primitives now rendered in software)
 * http://blogs.msdn.com/greg_schechter/archive/2006/05/02/588934.aspx

NOTE: Windows 7 appears to have reversed part of the Vista trend by
hardware accelerating as many of the GDI calls as they could

References:
 * http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx
 * http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/05/07/windows-7-gdi-performance-the-big-trade-off/

- Reece