[vwnc] Cairo graphics contd

Joachim, Travis, thanks for your answers.

 

I’ve in the mean time loaded Cairo, Pango, Ditto & Gizmo and when I run some of the examples they crash on MNU #fromPangoScale and #third.

 

Do you know of another package I have to load?

 

Next to that, I’ve tried the ‘SelectionExample’ in Gizmo which produces a very nice transparent selection rectangle with an animated border. But it is also *terribly slow*! When I click and drag the mouse from the top left corner of the window to the bottom right it takes about 60(!) seconds to complete the entire operation. The window’s extent 700x700 pixels.

 

Is this normal?

 

Thanks,

Mark

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On Oct 28, 2008, at 1:16 AM, Mark Plas wrote:

It is normal in the sense that many of these things were quick  
experiments/prototypes, are somewhat dated now, and represent early  
playing around.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
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Hi Travis,

In case of the SelectionExample, since it was an early experiment, would you say that it can easily be made a lot faster? It looks very good and promising, but is really extremely slow. You wouldn't be able to use it in actual production code.

What is exactly the part making it slow? It's not the transparent rectangle I think, because when I don't draw it, it's still equally slow.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Travis Griggs [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 16:14
To: Mark Plas
Cc: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [vwnc] Cairo graphics contd


On Oct 28, 2008, at 1:16 AM, Mark Plas wrote:

It is normal in the sense that many of these things were quick
experiments/prototypes, are somewhat dated now, and represent early
playing around.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
What's next, Intel Processors branded with "Apple Outside" stickers?



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--
Mike Hales
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KnowledgeScape
www.kscape.com

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Mark Plas wrote:
> Hi Travis,
>
> In case of the SelectionExample, since it was an early experiment, would you say that it can easily be made a lot faster? It looks very good and promising, but is really extremely slow. You wouldn't be able to use it in actual production code.
>
> What is exactly the part making it slow? It's not the transparent rectangle I think, because when I don't draw it, it's still equally slow.
>
>  
There are limits to what you can do with software rendering. The larger
the redraw area, the slower it will run. How do you get around this
problem? You use the graphics card hardware functions for blending,
stenciling, etc. One of the easier ways to do that is to program with
OpenGL (for cross platform), but it is a pretty big departure from the
easy APIs you get with cairographics.

In theory, an opengl backend can added to cairographics, which would
mean you might be able to get the speed improvements as well as the
convenient apis.

Besides that, the best bet is to simply reduce the amount of drawing you
have to do, by caching things instead of redrawing everything like the
SelectionExample does. So yeah, there are definitely things that can be
done to SelectionExample to make it faster.

Michael
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That’s good to know. I was fearing that, even though the graphics looked good, that they might not be useful in real life applications because of being too slow.

 

---

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Mike Hales
Sent: dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 17:22
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [vwnc] Cairo graphics contd

 

But not normal to assume that the Cairo rendering is slow rather some other aspect of the demo.  I have a deployed application with lots of Cairo, including icons, pango text layouts, process trends, schematic drawings etc all rendered with Cairo and performance of Cairo has never been a problem for us.

 

Mike

 

 

It is normal in the sense that many of these things were quick
experiments/prototypes, are somewhat dated now, and represent early
playing around.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
What's next, Intel Processors branded with "Apple Outside" stickers?



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--
Mike Hales
Engineering Manager
KnowledgeScape
www.kscape.com

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Hi Michael,

On the Cairo website there are notes about 'glitz', a backend for Cairo using openGL for hardware acceleration. It seems to be in an experimental form, but it sounds promising.

I did some further experiments with the SelectionExample to see what's causing the delays. It seems that the rectangles&triangles that are drawn are the major bottleneck. There are only 20 in total being drawn, which doesn't sound like that much, so that's a bit strange. But even without those, when I resize the window to full screen, redrawing the transparent rectangle starts becoming noticeably sluggish, but a lot less than with the small shapes in the background.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Lucas-Smith [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 18:08
To: Mark Plas
Cc: Travis Griggs; [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [vwnc] Cairo graphics contd

Mark Plas wrote:
> Hi Travis,
>
> In case of the SelectionExample, since it was an early experiment, would you say that it can easily be made a lot faster? It looks very good and promising, but is really extremely slow. You wouldn't be able to use it in actual production code.
>
> What is exactly the part making it slow? It's not the transparent rectangle I think, because when I don't draw it, it's still equally slow.
>
>
There are limits to what you can do with software rendering. The larger
the redraw area, the slower it will run. How do you get around this
problem? You use the graphics card hardware functions for blending,
stenciling, etc. One of the easier ways to do that is to program with
OpenGL (for cross platform), but it is a pretty big departure from the
easy APIs you get with cairographics.

In theory, an opengl backend can added to cairographics, which would
mean you might be able to get the speed improvements as well as the
convenient apis.

Besides that, the best bet is to simply reduce the amount of drawing you
have to do, by caching things instead of redrawing everything like the
SelectionExample does. So yeah, there are definitely things that can be
done to SelectionExample to make it faster.

Michael

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On Oct 29, 2008, at 3:59 AM, Steven Kelly wrote:

Steven, thanks for the numbers. IMO, that's actually pretty  
impressive. I'm sure it could be made to go faster in some cases,  
because there's such an impedence mismatch between first the GF/ST <->  
VW stuff, and then we've added another layer. For example, using  
Cairo's groupWhile: to do the buffering. We're hitting the Cairo a lot  
constantly setting the paint and stroke width (usually redundantly).  
Given that you got AA graphics suddenly, the ability to do xparency,  
and arbitrary xformation, and we only spent an hour or so on it,  
that's quite cool to me.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
If you can't say "Did it First!", you'd better be able to say "Did it  
Better!"



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hi,
related to the more general GF/ST framework, well,I would like to have some of your improvements, not only bug fixes.

If that would be possible, thanks a lot.

BTW: Steve,  were you able to do cairorized GF/ST after just the small time you spent at the OOSPLA table with Travis? seems fantastic to me to!

ciao
Giorgio



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