GLAMOR 0.5 Acceleration Library Released

Intel's GLAMOR 2D acceleration library over OpenGL is further glamorized by its new v0.5.0 release.

Key highlights of GLAMOR 0.5 that were made in three months of development include support tiling large pixmaps to multiple small textures, enabling of a gradient shader, optimized glyph rendering performance, and implementing first shader to generate trapezoids. Zhigang Gong of Intel cites a 10x improvement in a one cairo-demo workload while other workloads are seeing about a 2x improvement.

Other GLAMOR 0.5 details were previously talked about in GLAMOR 0.5 To Advance 2D Over OpenGL.

While Intel's been doing much of the GLAMOR development and their xf86-video-intel driver was the first to support this 2D-over-OpenGL acceleration method as an alternative (see Intel Glamor Acceleration Compared To SNA, UXA), the most exciting promise for this project is actually with AMD. AMD is using GLAMOR for its only 2D acceleration on new hardware (the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer). However, GLAMOR will also work with older generations of Radeon hardware and there it's showing real promise to the point of even outperforming Radeon's existing EXA implementation.

GLAMOR 0.5.0 details can be found on the X.Org mailing list.