[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Re: Scratchbox is not an emulator

[From: Daniel Stone]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:47:33PM -0400, ext Andrew Barr wrote:
> That penguin.swf blog is only mildly interesting, though. Cairo (do they
> mean XRender too or just Cairo?) might not work but if you've ever used
> the Linux Flash player on anything but cutting-edge hardware you know
> they need to use some kind of graphics acceleration. It's amazing it
> works as good as it does. 

It depends.  If you need pixel-perfect rendering, then this is actually
impossible, because either the spec (e.g. Render, which does exactly the
opposite of what people expect with respect to some things, like
rounding the wrong way) will specify behaviour you don't want, or in the
case of hardware acceleration, it's unspecified.

Case in point: you can't accelerate wide lines and have a
strictly-conformant X server.  The spec detailed the exact algorithm for
how the lines had to be rasterised.  For a start, it was horrendously
ugly and the lines looked awful, but secondly, it means you can't use
hardware acceleration, because you're not going to get lines that are
pixel-perfect to the spec.

So, there's not a great deal Flash could accelerate, even if it did want
to.  It does its own rasterising for very good reasons.

Cheers,
Daniel