On Wednesday, September 4, 2002, at 02:14  Uhr, Andrew C. Greenberg 
wrote:

> Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) employs a technology denominated "Quartz 
> Extreme," apparently a 2D drawing technology for screen components 
> exploiting hardware rendering solutions.  Essentially, screen elements 
> are stored as OpenGL textures and are rendered on the screen via 
> hardware, resulting in a speedier, zippier interface.

Yes,

> Would such a technology be speedy or beneficial for Morphic?  
> Practical?  Straightforward?  Can we leverage the OpenGL work Andreas 
> has done to put together a proof of concept?

I guess it could be appled to individual Morphs, but that would require 
low-level bit-slinging fairly high up in the Squeak layers, and some 
loss of flexibility in how to munge thos bits.  I am also not sure it 
would help much, because screen-update (blitting) seems only a tiny 
part of the total amount of time spent in Morphic.

That said, I was going to try to use OpenGL texture rendering for 
Squeak's Display.  OS X's OpenGL impelementation features a texture 
mode where the texture lives in a user-defined buffer in main-memory, 
and is accessed via AGP as needed.  There are also some synchronization 
primitives so that you can tell the hardware that something changed.

By setting up the hardware to point to Squeak's Display bitmap, 
screen-updates/blits would essentiall become no-ops, which should make 
them rather fast ;-)

Marcel

-- 
Marcel Weiher				Metaobject Software Technologies
marcel at metaobject.com		www.metaobject.com
Metaprogramming for the Graphic Arts.   HOM, IDEAs, MetaAd etc.