Fast Image Manipulation?

[SEGV <mlepage cgocable net>]

It occurred to me that instead of doing all my own performance testing (and it
still may come to that), I'd ask here.

What's the fastest way to get stuff onto the screen? I'm talking double buffer
here. Currently I draw to an offscreen pixmap then blast it all at once to an
onscreen drawing area widget. I can't just use a Gnome canvas because I probably
will need tight control over the drawing.

I'm looking to draw to a visible region of at least 640x480. I want to draw at
30fps (ie, once per 33ms). And I want to draw perhaps a hundred or two images,
around icon size. They will be moving and animating.

Think StarCraft.

I've tried lots of stuff so far, mostly in the underlying model. I have
solutions that work fast but don't scale well into the high hundreds or
thousands (lots offscreen, obviously). I'm still working on it though. The more
time I shave off drawing, the more time I have to manipulate the model.

I'm using gdk_imlib to load the images, works great. What's the difference
between GdkPixmap and GdkImage? Is one faster?

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SEGV    http://www.cgocable.net/~mlepage/