[linux-audio-dev] GTK performance?

[Jens M Andreasen]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 11:14 +0100, Steve Harris wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 11:45:57 +0200, Jens M Andreasen wrote:
> > Hi all!
> > 
> > The other day I dressed up my application with a fancy g5-ish pixmap
> > theme. Looks good and expensive :) 
> > 
> > As it turned out, it really was expensive (counting cpu-clocks.)
> 
> Unless you have an ultra-bleeding edge X setup a lot of the work of the
> pixmap drawing is done by the CPU, thats quite a lot of maths. There is
> some new tech which uses OpenGL to do the X drawing, which moves a lot of
> the load off to the graphics card, but its not really available yet.
> http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fXgl
> 
> This /really/ helps, for e.g. I have a beta version of meterbridge that
> can use OpenGL or SDL (X) pixmaps, on my thinkpad (which has a comparitivly
> hardcore graphics chip, but its only a laptop) I can fill the screen with
> 32 scaled VU meters at about 3% CPU load, with SDL it maxes out the CPU
> when I have about half that number of unscaled meters (the SDL code doesnt
> do scaling, its too expensive).

Still leaves me wondering how on earth gtk can use the equivalence of a
200 Mhz pentium to figure out that nothing happened?

So a faster redraw is of course always welcome, but redrawing (or
whatever is going on) when old == new is really not on my todo list.

What is even "funnier" is that mouse behaviour seems to take a different
route with next to no overhead.

> 
> - Steve 
-- 

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  c[]  //  Jens M Andreasen