On Sat, Jan 17, 2004 at 06:29:46PM +0100, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo,
Steve Harris hat gesagt: // Steve Harris wrote:
True enough :) but I think it takes a reasonable
ammount of talent to make
really intuative and compact UIs (screen realestate is an issue) even if
if doesnt have a photorealistic interface. Theres a loopbased performace
instrument that I think is a really good example (I cant remeber its
name),
Ableton Live, maybe? It has a exceptionally well thought out
interface, IMO.
Yes, that's it.
Regarding OpenGL: Although this could be a nice API
for doing all
kinds of interfaces, the hardware side on Linux is looking
increasingly worse because of the XFree86 peoples' decision to go
modular and allow closed source drivers for DRI. Now we're in a
situation, where only old chipsets like Matrox G550 or incapable ones
like the Intel graphics chips have open source Open GL drivers. Nvidia
OTOH does provide decent drivers but they are closed source and
reportedly also could have a bad impact on audio performance. Even
most newer ATI cards don't have open source OpenGL drivers anymore,
although there are efforts to write some.
I think the "one step down from top of the range" ATI cards are
supported, and the NVIDIA drivers dont have any impact on latency, though
the are partly binary, yes.
All this is really a problem to be considered when
deciding to base a
GUI on Open GL. In most (audio) cases a 2D-interface would suffice,
I'm sure.
Thge UI is 2D (you turn off perspective before you draw), its just a way
of loading all the images and stuff onto the card, and making it do the
drawing maths. It saves a /lot/ of cpu. Its more-or-less how the latest
OSX GUI code works, and its very efficient.
- Steve