| |||||||||||||
XDC2012: OpenGL futuresXDC2012: OpenGL futuresPosted Oct 10, 2012 5:06 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: XDC2012: OpenGL futures by dlang Parent article: XDC2012: OpenGL futures
If it was cheaper to just shovel pixels around, the GPU graphics cards would never have taken off. Sorry, but no. GPU graphics cards have "taken off" as separate, dedicated hardware for 3D. In in about the same era first graphics chipsets (which used the fact that it's cheap enough to just shovel [fully rendered] pixels around) arrived. They went out of favor for a long time because it's hard to build realistic 3D render but it's very easy to attach RAMDAC to anything. Later it was found that GPUs need fast low-latency pipes and they got them and today they have dedicated connection to CPU or are even totally merged with CPU. No, if anything GPUs evolution show that you need fast, wide pipe between GPU and CPU and then you can have much slower and narrower pipe which delivers fully-rendered picture. IOW: X architecture (where 3D was in X Server) is long obsolete, it's time for something like Wayland (where CPU and GPU used are local and only fully processed picture is sent over the wire). Of course fully-rendered picture without any compression is still too large, so we need to compress it somehow - but this is separate issue.
(Log in to post comments)
XDC2012: OpenGL futures Posted Oct 11, 2012 10:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Of course, you don't need Wayland for that -- as Eric pointed out, you can implement the send-images-over-the-wire thing without changing anything about the current user-visible API/ABI. It's not like the clients care where the rendering is being performed: they just care that it *is* performed.
The answer to everything is not always "Wayland".
XDC2012: OpenGL futures Posted Oct 12, 2012 15:40 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] That's why I've said something like Wayland. I'm pretty sure it's possible to build system which does rendering locally and is backward-compatible, too. Do we want that? That's different question.
XDC2012: OpenGL futures Posted Oct 12, 2012 15:59 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Backward compatible with X? The X server can output to Wayland just fine AFAIK so there should be no trouble continuing to use the X protocol for as long as you wish. It's backwards compatible in much the same way XQuartz provides compatibility.
|
|||||||||||||