[cairo] Where's the bottleneck in using glitz/cairo/librsvg?

[Federico Mena Quintero]

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 09:16 -0700, Keith Packard wrote:

> As the Xara code is just software, to a great extent it "doesn't matter"
> to us. We must focus on the accelerated case, and design code across the
> library and X server which takes adavantage of these capabilities. Even
> Xara can't match the performance of glitz today.

With the little study I'm doing of where GNOME is deployed [1], it's
becoming very clear that the great majority of *users* are thin clients.
I haven't figured out if it's mostly X-terminal-as-thin-client, or
VNC-as-thin-client-with-X-server-in-a-central-fat-box.

In the first case, X terminals very rarely support the RENDER extension.
In the second case, a VNC-like scheme just pushes pixels.  In either
case we get no benefit from client-side hardware acceleration.  So we
need a really good software-only renderer to make this usable at all for
big deployments.  Later we can think of how to improve the architecture
of thin clients so that they can take advantage of hardware
acceleration.

[1]
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2006-06.html#questions-for-deployments

  Federico