Re: directx gdk backend?

["Michael Lawrence" <lawremi iastate edu>]

On 2/10/07, Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi> wrote:

Michael Lawrence writes:
> From what I have read, it sounds like Windows Vista has regressed from XP in
> that it no longer offers any hardware acceleration for GDI.

Don't believe all you read. Not long ago, somebody claimed on gtk-list
that Vista wouldn't support the traditional Win32 API at all. Of
course, that was very far from the truth.

> Does this mean that GDK will perform more slowly on Vista compared
> to XP?

No idea. If you are concerned, do some measurements.

> The performance of GDK is already slow when drawing lots of
> graphics, mostly due to this bug:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51828,

Do you have any measurements to back up this claim, that drawing
multiple rectangles after eachother (which is what the bug seems to be
about) is something that would be happening a lot?

It may not happen in most use cases, but it happens often in a statistical graphics app I am developing. win32 is significantly slower than X11 when drawing many points. When drawing plots with say 25000 circles, Windows is at least 5x slower. Unfortunately, Windows is by far the most common platform for our user base. I realize that this is not a common use case, so I would be willing to invest some of my own time to fix this, if it's at all feasible to bring Windows even to X11.  Would DirectX be the best way to go or are there other possible optimizations?

Thanks,
Michael