Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

> if you want the Mesa software rasterizer to be faster you can start
> contributing to Mesa. I'm sure the maintainers will gladly accept
> patches.

By the time you've hit the GL layer you've probably thrown away crucial
information needed for many shortcuts.

Doom is also much less generic (as to a large extent is quake) but
engines use some shortcuts that work for simplified cases. In the doom
world you can't look up or down or twist the scene, in quake the twisting
is also not present.

Spotting those cases with arch specific mesa fast paths would probably be
a win for Clutter (especially the 2D flat on view) but I am pretty sure
you would still need clutter itself to be more efficient in areas like
clipping and to have compositing shortcuts (these can't be inferred by GL)
to have a chance of it being useful even on modern low end desktops with
two big monitors attached. Much stuff for this seems to be in the clutter
development codebase already.

Alan