Comments on: GTK+ performance without RENDER

By: Jon Dowland

Jon Dowland — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Is XRENDER the GL-dependent thing? I’m having a lot of trouble reminding myself what it is. If it was, I would have ranted as follows: “since there are very few open source 3D card drivers out there, I’d argue the open source way was *NOT* to make more and more of the desktop be useless without the proprietry software.”. Since I can’t figure it out, I will rant thusly instead: “xrender is one of those things where the authors and those responsible for the site etc. are, intentionally or not, making vast assumptions that people looking for their software already know what it is, how it works, what it needs, etc.”

By: Billy Biggs

Billy Biggs — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Jon, RENDER is an X extension and is part of every Linux X server released in the past few years. It is not a GL-dependent thing. The problem I am describing is only an issue when using GTK+ applications on old X servers or thin clients, and maybe some Win32 X servers.

By: Shawn

Shawn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

how about looking at some of the currently implemented do-it-myself work arounds that are in use which seem to improve performance and comparing the approach they tkae. the work the guys from the enlightenment do come to mind, in that they seem to beable to achieve alot without have to rely on XRENDER. Basically Imlib2 seems able to achieve some decent performance, maybe some approaches they use can be used as well?

By: Karsten

Karsten — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

FWIW a quote from the NVIDIA closed-source Linux driver README:

Option "RenderAccel" "boolean"

Enable or disable hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension. THIS
OPTION IS EXPERIMENTAL. ENABLE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. There is no
correctness test suite for the RENDER extension so NVIDIA can not
verify that RENDER acceleration works correctly. Default: hardware
acceleration of the RENDER extension is disabled.