Re: XF86 and full-screen graphical console apps

[Magnus Norddahl <mbn@dark.x.dtu.dk>]

Quoting Pierre Phaneuf (pp@ludusdesign.com):

> (--) SVGA: XAA: Solid filled rectangles

Used rarely by games - and when they finaly do, it is only used to clear the
screen once per frame.

> (--) SVGA: XAA: Screen-to-screen copy

... but all pixmaps are stored in system memory -> not used by your games.
... and since the doublebuffer extension doesn't put the backbuffer in video
memory either -> not used by your games.

> (--) SVGA: XAA: 8x8 pattern fill
> (--) SVGA: XAA: 8x8 color expand pattern fill

Never used by games.

> (--) SVGA: XAA: CPU to screen color expansion (bitmap, TE/NonTE
> imagetext, TE/NonTE polytext)

I have no idea what this is.

> (--) SVGA: XAA: Using 8 128x128 areas for pixmap caching

yep - stored in software. I have the same acceleration on my display card
(Riva128), but guess what: pixmaps are incredible SLOW. Just try and run
ClanLib's pacman game.

Anyone that wants to mention XShm pixmaps used by other game sdk: This is
not hardware accelerated -> thus svgalib does it just as fast.

> (--) SVGA: XAA: Caching tiles and non-transparent stipples

Never used by games.

> (--) SVGA: XAA: Horizontal and vertical lines and segments

Very limited use in games - have no performance impact at all.

> I agree that XFree86 isn't very impressive on many accounts, I would
> just notice that my S3 ViRGE is NOT ACCELERATED AT ALL with SVGALib and
> that XFree86 XAA reports solid filled rectangles, screen-to-screen copy,
> color expansion, pixmap caching and others...
> 
> That seems more than sufficient for me, when you take into account that
> SVGALib has no acceleration whatsoever for my ViRGE.

I'm just saying that you do not gain any noticeable performance by using
XFree86...

--
Magnus Norddahl
ClanSoft