Re: GdkPixbuf vs. Cairo, new image library needed?

["Milosz Derezynski" <internalerror gmail com>]

I've been thninking about this issue for some while now as well, and I've written (in gtkmm straight, so i didn't attempt to provide patches yet) a CairoImageSurface cellrenderer, and a few miscellaneous widgets which render directly a Cairo ImageSurface to a drawable instead of doing roundtrips. The renderer is a drop-in replacement for CellRendererPixbuf, it also has a pixbuf property, in which case it will render just that, otherwise it's possible to make it render imagesurface directly, or construct some in a cell data function.

There is however one more problem which wasn't discussed yet in this thread: Widget insensitivity and the gtk style engines. The Pixbuf cellrenderer uses the gtk style engine to render its state when insensitive. It also uses a "gtkcellrendererpixbuf" detail to the style engine, and (thinking of Aaron Bockover's blog post about "Suboptimal Theming") possibly checks if the "widget" arg passed to it is a TreeView as well (i didn't check).

My widgets fall back to rendering a Pixbuf version of the Cairo surface when insensitive, which is of suboptimal indeed.

-- Milosz

On 10 Oct 2007 21:46:38 +0200, Soeren Sandmann <sandmann daimi au dk> wrote:

"BJörn Lindqvist" <bjourne gmail com> writes:

> Incidentally, blitting pixbufs is slower than it has to be because its
> format rarely matches the X11 server which uses either xRGB32 or
> ARGB32.

I don't disagree with anything else you say, but this "performance
issue" is really a non-issue. We are talking about data on the client
here, so there is no way the X server can hardware accelerate those
blits [1]. This means we are back to software in both cases, and in
that case the difference between convert_and_copy_data() and
copy_data() is completely negligble.


Soren


[1] Some day, maybe, we'll be able to DMA directly out of client
memory, but this will require lots of work in both the kernel and the
X server. We are still far away from that being possible.
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