Re: [spam score 3.32/10.0 -pobox] [gtk-list] gdk_draw_* and friends

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Deborah Swayne <dfs@research.att.com> writes:
> I've been interested all discussion about plural gdk_draw
> routines, since I'm used to using those in X, and I do a <lot> of
> drawing -- scatterplots of up to 100,000 points, which may be in
> motion.  I was delighted to be convinced that they don't improve
> performance, because it simplifies my code to get rid of them.
> 

BTW, you may want to consider client-side drawing into an RGB buffer
for this; it works well for Guppi (www.gnome.org/guppi).

Basically you can do all your drawing directly into an RGB buffer, 
then ship the RGB buffer to the server. It can be faster than sending
tons of X protocol over the wire, depending on what you're doing.

(In general, if your end result can be expressed more concisely as a
grid of pixels than as a series of primitive shape-drawing requests,
then it may be faster to draw on the client side. The extreme is
rendering an image by gdk_draw_point() of each pixel, where an RGB
buffer definitely means a huge speedup. The other extreme is that
shipping an entire RGB buffer over the wire to draw a line, instead of
shipping the two line endpoints over the wire, means the RGB buffer is
a huge slowdown. Of course there's a big continuum in between the
extremes.)

Havoc