GDI question

[Mike Hearn]

>
>
>Slow slow! try anything related to moving graphics (photoshop, macromedia, 
>explorer with flash) the performance is VERY slow. Want to see how slow? 
>install a Trident or a Cirrus Logic graphics card (ISA) and see the speed ;)
>
>Thanks,
>Hetz
>
Well, I just tried a simple comparison of the Adobe SVG plugin under 
Wine and IE6 on Windows XP. Wine _is_ slower by a visible amount when 
doing repeated bitblts such as the plugin does on an animation I have, 
but it's certainly not something that'd actually affect real world 
usage. I don't think GDI performance is really an issue at present, most 
apps don't do these kind of repeated double-buffer switches (i assume 
flash doesn't actually use the gdi to render into its backbuffer?) so it 
only affects apps like photoshop and director/flash.

In particular when I run the SVG plugin, I can see a FIXME talking about 
a potential optimization, so really the issue is just a case of elbow 
grease for optimizations (esp in bitblt) rather than a rewrite I'd guess.

A bit offtopic, but I find it fascinating that one guy commented earlier 
on how an MS sales rep claimed the "linux emulations" didn't always run 
Windows apps. Presumably this guy was just a normal sales team member, 
so it makes me wonder how well briefed MS employees are about Wine. It'd 
be fun to go through the mailing list system and extract hits from 
*.microsoft.com addresses, they probably mirror it internally if they 
monitor it at all. I know when I met a veep from the Passport department 
he was all too aware of Wine, which surprised me because he wasn't 
directly connected with the OS division, which makes me wonder how up to 
date their knowledge is. In fact, he was almost scared of it. Left an 
impression on me for sure.