Mesa Lands Support For GL_EXT_window_rectangles

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Lands Support For GL_EXT_window_rectangles

The newest OpenGL extension now supported by Mesa is GL_EXT_window_rectangles...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-GL-Window-Rectangles

[Azrael5]

Excellent news. What's the main benefit of this feature? Which relase of MESA will implement it? thanks.

[Serafean]

This sounds like something extremely useful for window managers...

[stqn]

This is nice, maybe for window managers, but I don’t think puzzle or board game authors will bother with that…

[Azrael5]

Avoiding unnecessary work on GPU side by telling it which parts of the screen don't need any modifications in advance.

https://www.opengl.org/registry/spec...rectangles.txt

Thnaks for the answer: what are the implications on programs used as the browsers as example? Users will get better hardware acceleration on rasterization? is this feature systematically implemented in every program or the utilities will have to be adapted to take benefit of this feature? Question is simple: how many of these improvements are really used by the operating systems and programs?

[Azrael5]

I'm not really familiar with how browsers do work, but I guess this suits them as well, because HTML elements drawn on top of each other do need to be composited at some point. Further reading: GPU Accelerated Compositing in Chrome

Well, this is a new extension (released on 2016/06/09). Once exposed by drivers, the applications won't get magically faster, and they do need to be modified in order to take advantage of it.

I think we will have a smoother desktop experience once it gets implemented by GTK, Qt, mutter, kwin, etc. LibreOffice Impress, Krita, etc are good candidates too.

Hardware has a lot of abilities which often are not used because of lacking of implementation on software and drivers.

thanks for the answer, very useful.

[plonoma]

Is this extension also made with MST in mind?
MST stands for Multi-Stream Transport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Multiple_displays_on_single_DisplayPort_connector

[Stebs]

Thnaks for the answer: what are the implications on programs used as the browsers as example?

Yes, also browsers could use it as speedup. Google has patches for skia for their Chrome Browser (Firefox also uses skia). Here are some slides from Nvidia with some explanations:

http://www.slideshare.net/Mark_Kilgard/extwindowrectangles