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Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Xara Xtreme 4.0 released



On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 17:47:05 -0300, "bulia byak" wrote:
> (Sorry but that reminds me of your claims of outperforming Cairo by
> some insane margin, but when Carl Worth asked you for specifics of
> your testing, AFAIK you never came up with the real data.)

Since my name got mentioned here, I should say that I don't think
that's quite accurate.

I didn't ever see the actual benchmark program, but Charles did point
me to people, (he hadn't run the benchmark himself, unsurprisingly),
who did describe what the benchmark was actually testing.

There are definitely things that are slow in cairo, (particularly in
its software fallbacks). We try to avoid using those, (preferring to
get hardware-accelerated performance through the X server, etc.---but
even then things aren't always don in the X server either). And
sometimes you really do need to use the software backend. We've got
our own benchmarks on the cairo list showing that liboil code can do
much faster compositing than what's currently in cairo/pixman and
several experimental scanline-based polygon rasterizers, (presumably
similar to the approach in Xara), that are much faster for software
rendering than cairo's current tessellate-then-rasterize-trapezoids
approach.

So I'm not immediately dismissive of the benchmark results. There's no
doubt that the Xara demos I saw running were impressively fast.

But sure, I would have preferred to see the actual benchmark source,
(and even more I would have loved to see all the Xara source). I still
would love to be able to "apt-get install xaralx" just like I can
"apt-get install inkscape". Oh well.

-Carl

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