The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:50 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)In reply to: The same discussion again and again... by slashdot
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
that doesn't require running a full optimizing compiler at runtime (LLVM)
I'm not an expert but I thought that graphics acceleration required a JIT compiler to translate the standard bytecode to the underlying instruction set and capabilities of the hardware. nVidia and ATI don't have the same instruction sets or system design for their GPUs. Having this process also able to target the host CPU with fully optimized fast code just makes sense.
Modern hardware definitely does not "implement OpenGL": OpenGL is actually an ungodly mess of extensions that requires an incredible amount of code to map to hardware.
You may not like aesthetically how the OpenGL API has grown organically over the years but it is the standard API for creating and running programs on the GPU. Having an optimized compiler so you can build software which targets both the GPU or CPU so graphics programs can run even when there is not dedicated hardware for them seems like a good idea.
I don't think it follows that having an incompatible "2d" backend is going to be any faster than optimizing the existing graphics API