https://bobcopeland.com/blog/tags/graphics/ Recent content in Graphics on Insignificant Bits Hugo en-US Sun, 03 Apr 2016 21:24:05 +0000 https://bobcopeland.com/blog/2016/04/on-drawing-squares/ Sun, 03 Apr 2016 21:24:05 +0000 http://bobcopeland.com/blog/?p=2286 <p>I&rsquo;ve been looking at the sample drawing in <a href="https://github.com/bcopeland/speccy">speccy</a> to try and speed it up. For a given frame, it renders about 10000 points as 9-pixel anti-aliased squares using Cairo, in Python. On my desktop (Debian stable, Nouveau driver) it gets a pokey 1 FPS.</p> <p>My graphics knowledge is about 20 years old at this point, and while I did once know various arcane tricks on the hardware of the day, none of that is relevant now. So I know basically nothing about modern graphics. It is still not clear to me to what extent the 2D primitives use acceleration, and it doesn&rsquo;t help much that, in as many years that I&rsquo;ve been asleep on this topic, there seems to have been as many new APIs introduced and retired: today there are at least XRender, XAA, EXA, UXA, SNA, and Glamor &ndash; did I miss any?</p>