Morphic Extreme
Marcel Weiher
squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Wed Sep 4 17:53:05 UTC 2002
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.
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