I just woke up, started my Quassel and saw a red line in #kdegames saying: ‘have a look at the planet 
’. So I did.
This gave me two pretty good articles. The first one by Albert Astals Cid [1] about a bug I files after LinuxTag Berlin where we were playing KSquares on my touchscreen and found it highly annoying that computer players cause a lot of lag when they do a move. To see where this came from I turned my ‘show paint’ desktop effect on and saw that almost the whole game screen is repainted after every move. Even when the update which is called should only redraw a small QRect. (that was the historic background)
Then the blogpost by Zack Rusin [2] about how the painting in Qt works with the different engines gave a lot of background info on how this all works. What I find great news is his closing sentence: ‘The quicker we get the rendering stack to work on top of OpenGL the better off we’ll be.’ I never made a secret about being a big supporter of OpenGL, so this is amazing for me.
Then the sad part: as posted by me during the week I’m on the Redmond OS now (mainly because of Raster video performance compared to the 2.6.27 Intel driver shipped with OpenSuSE).
I immediately fired up KSquares to test what it would do:
-
- KSquares OpenGL Graphicssystem
-
- KSquares Raster Graphicssystem
This does not look too good yet. To top it all off: deleting a QWidget when using the OpenGL graphicssystem crashes the application (tested with Kolourpaint, KSquares & Dolphin, my own 3 line app which only creates a widget does not crash however (odd)).
The biggest problem there is for cross-platform compatibility is however the Redmond OS. Everything should work. but the OpenGL header shipped with the platform SDK’s is only the OpenGL 1.0 specification. They made a call wglGetProcAddress to get newer extensions (for example it does not detect if GL_ARB_TEXTURE_NON_POWER_OF_TWO is available automatically, which is supported in almost all hardware from after 2000, even for mobile phones). So here we have to extend Qt & KDE core a bit (this extensions has to be available to be able to use 32×32 or 48×48 pixel icons for example).
So I’ll dive a bit into graphicssystems today to see what happens ;-)
You might want to try upgrading to the X server and kernel in this repository: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Moblin:/Base/openSUSE_11.1/ .
I’m using openSUSE 11.1 with a 2.6.30 kernel and intel driver 2.8.0 and performance is great (not that I had any problems before with my 945GME, but it’s even better).
@ianjo: I doubt that comment is gonna help make KDE apps work better on windows
True, but I was replying to the part that said
“Then the sad part: as posted by me during the week I’m on the Redmond OS now (mainly because of Raster video performance compared to the 2.6.27 Intel driver shipped with OpenSuSE).”
Nice!
Sadly I’m using the Redmond OS as well, because linux fucking sucks when it comes to Intel video cards….
It all used to be good, but when “Linux” decides to fix something, it has to fucking break it into pieces in all the ‘good and stable’ distros in order to achieve some good stuff way later on (probably because companies working on linux consider shipping crap a way to get some beta testing done and force people to write patches).
Linux, pull your shit together!
Dread Knight:
“It all used to be good, but when “Linux” decides to fix something, it has to fucking break it into pieces in all the ‘good and stable’ distros in order to achieve some good stuff way later on”
You do realize that is Intel employees paid by Intel to work on drivers for Intel hardware who are responsible for maintaining the Intel graphics video support in Linux, right?
Jus’ saying.