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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Regarding KDE 4
From:       Luciano Montanaro <mikelima () cirulla ! net>
Date:       2004-07-03 14:01:35
Message-ID: 200407031601.38613.mikelima () cirulla ! net
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On Saturday 03 July 2004 13:18, Zack Rusin wrote:
> On Saturday 03 July 2004 07:03, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> > I have read as much in the Trolltech Qt teaser article. It is
> > mentioned as a possibility. If/when Cairo takes ground, it will
> > surely be a possibility, however, since the initial targetted backend
> > seem to include X11 and OpenGL, between the ones that can be of
> > interest to KDE.
>
> I'm not sure what's your point here. I said "It is not certain Qt 4 will
> have Cairo Aurthur backend." and you said the exact same thing. So I'm
> not sure why I had to read it.
>

I merely wanted to state that, even if Cairo is not on the horizon now, 
it may well be at a later stage. 
My reply was not meant for you personally, I merely wanted to add my two cents 
to the thread. Is this annoying you? I feel a bit of hostility, and I don't 
understand why. 

> > I'm not sure I follow you here: desktop level translucency support
> > can be achieved only if all the underlying system support it -- so if
> > X11 does not, we would end up with the hacks that can be seen
> > nowadays.
>
> We were talking about translucency in general. Not desktop level
> translucency. Try to easily create a QPushButton with transparent
> background in your application.
>

Are you sure? I think it's you that misunderstood, maybe because Damien has 
rolled everything together without much explanation. Most of the time, when 
speaking of transparency, people seem to refer to the desktop level kind, 
that is, the darn drop shadow window border. Application-level transparency 
support could be achieved even without X support, but whithout acceleration 
it is not going to be extremely useful, at least in general.

> > So, the Compose and Damage extensions are needed to handle the
> > translucent window compositing. And X11 will probably need OpenGL
> > capable hardware (and lots video RAM) to compose the translucent
> > windows on the screen each time the transparent area is damaged.
>
> Which we haven't been talking about.
>

Again, are you sure? Damien referred to "true translucency", which is the 
kind of things that the Compose extension is supposed to achieve.
And while KDE may not have to deal with OpenGL directly, the general plan in 
the X development community seem to be to layer X over OpenGL. Even if that
is ditched, the current cards OpenGL capabilities must be used to obtain
the level of acceleration needed to make the special effect bearable.

> > And about the animation, again, what is the problem? It's just a
> > matter of programming it. Unless you are referring to those warping
> > effect when minimizing windows, which could be unpractical without 3d
> > acceleration.
>
> Read the email where you'll see that when he says "cool animations and
> effects" he refers to OpenGL. And since most of the time we won't be
> using OpenGL backend, OpenGL animations/effects become useles.
>

Well, this depends on when KDE4 gets released :) However, in this case
this is the realm of the "composition manager", or the window manager, 
at most, and it remains to be seen when these extensions will be released
for general use. If you want to say that it's a bit early to discuss these 
things, however, I agree. 

> > Hopefully the situation will improve, however. Render acceleration
> > should be finally in the xorg CVS for Radeon drivers. Using Render
>
> That's again not true. r250 are not supported. I'm using Radeon 9000
> with r250 and I'm not going to get acceleration anytime soon.
>

Fortunately for me, I have a Radeon 7500, and it should be supported :)
I have not tried the CVS code yet, however. But that's not my point. My point 
is that render acceleration is being worked on, even if the progress seem to 
be slow.

> > directly, or using Cairo, in the end does matter much.
>the XRender extension.

> The two prominent rendering backends for Cairo are Render and Glitz so
> it's not "Cairo or Render".
>

I intended to say that maybe Qt could bind directly to the Render API, 
instead of using the higher level Cairo bindings. Since OpenGL was explicity
listed in the Qt-quarterly article as a backend, maybe the X11 backend could 
include the XRender extension. We'll have to wait for the Qt4 prerelease to
know for sure.

Ciao,
Luciano
 
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