[cairo] acceleration

Patrick Shirkey pshirkey at boosthardware.com
Tue Oct 2 16:25:18 PDT 2012


On Wed, October 3, 2012 9:10 am, Henry (Yu) Song - SISA wrote:
> I am not sure your question.  acceleration in gl driver? or acceleration
> using gl-backend vs. image-backend in cairo?
>

According to wikipedia cairo "uses acceleration when available". So as
that is rather vague I need to prove or disprove that cairo will use the
GPU for 2d acceleration for the image-backend. My experience with cairo on
gtk2 suggests that the computations are handled by the cpu unless
explicitly requested to use cairo_gl_surface.


> if you want to use gl backend, create cairo_gl_surface instead of using
> cairo_image_surface.  Again, the performance of cairo_gl_surface vs.
> cairo_image_surface depends on your gl driver quality as Chris said.
>

Thanks, does cairo_gl_surface work with all opengl or only opengl es ?


> Henry
> ________________________________________
> From: cairo-bounces+hsong=sisa.samsung.com at cairographics.org
> [cairo-bounces+hsong=sisa.samsung.com at cairographics.org] on behalf of
> Patrick Shirkey [pshirkey at boosthardware.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2012 3:46 PM
> To: cairo at cairographics.org
> Subject: Re: [cairo] acceleration
>
> On Tue, October 2, 2012 9:39 pm, Chris Wilson wrote:
>> On Tue, 2 Oct 2012 21:25:43 +1000 (EST), "Patrick Shirkey"
>> <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, October 2, 2012 9:16 pm, Chris Wilson wrote:
>>> > On Tue, 2 Oct 2012 15:35:38 +1000 (EST), "Patrick Shirkey"
>>> > <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>>> >> Hi,
>>> >>
>>> >> Is there a simple test to know if cairo is using acceleration or is
>>> it
>>> >> just a matter of running a desktop with glx?
>>> >
>>> > Cairo dodges the complicated question of how to setup the rendering
>>> > pipeline leaving that to the application/toolkit. So in order for
>>> cairo
>>> > to use GL, the application must create a set of output Windows
>>> > compatible with GL and pass those and the context to cairo to use.
>>> The
>>> > degree of acceleration then depends upon the quality of the driver
>>> and
>>> > the style of rendering. In short, do not expect to switching to
>>> cairo-gl
>>> > to be an easy task to get fast rendering.
>>>
>
>
> In terms of 2d acceleration how would I know if cario is using the GPU or
> CPU?
>
>
>
>
>>> Thanks Chris.
>>>
>>> Is the recommended approached to use cogl directly, cairo or clutter?
>>
>> Use the appropriate tool to hand :)
>>
>> Clutter is excellent for controlling animations and emergent behaviour.
>> Cairo offers a simple means for describing a page layout (or parts there
>> of).
>> Cogl aims to make using OpenGL simpler and more portable, with a few
>> additional smarts.
>>
>>> FYI, I am using python3 with gtk3 and so far the only code I have been
>>> able to make work with this combination are the clutter examples.
>>>
>>> I have some existing opengl. I am looking at either porting it to
>>> cogl/clutter or if there is a way to load it directly with cairo that I
>>> have yet to come across.
>>
>> If you are starting from OpenGL, probably easier to go to clutter+cogl.
>> Cairo comes into its own for having a higher level description of paths
>> and shapes, but if you already are well versed in translating into
>> OpenGL, then you probably do not need Cairo and will probably be better
>> to avoid the impedance mismatch between the PDF rendering model and
>> OpenGL. However, if Cairo makes your design and maintenance easier, have
>> fun!
>> -Chris
>>
>> --
>> Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre
>>
>
>
> --
> Patrick Shirkey
> Boost Hardware Ltd
> --
> cairo mailing list
> cairo at cairographics.org
> http://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo
>


--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd


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