Re: GSoC project: new graphics backend

[Arseniy Lartsev]

On Sunday 29 March 2009 16:13:08 Michael Goffioul wrote:
> To be honest, I'm not convinced  you would gain anything and I don't
> see the added value:
>
> - you're adding yet another layer in the rendering process, which
> will probably have an impact on the speed
It will take one extra microsecond to render each plot.

> - while this seems pretty easy in the case of a line, I don't think
> this will still be the case for complex objects like transparent
> shaded surfaces
Less simple, but still not too complicated.

> - in the sample above, you want to perform the graphic transformation
> yourself; so you'll loose any hardware acceleration advantage in OpenGL
I don't quite understand what you mean, could you please explain more details 
to me?
>
> - in some cases, you can implement rendering optimization
> techniques by rendering a graphical object as a whole, instead of
> only being given fragments of it
I don't know in what situation it might happen.

> - I understand what you're trying to do, by trying to have a renderer
> object as simple as possible, such that it's easier to add a new one,
> but I think that in the end, you'll loose efficiency, while there might
> be 2 or 3 actual renderers required or implemented
>
> IMO I don't think we should go further in the granularity (or level of
> refinement) of the renderer object. I'd be much more enthousiast if
> you'd be willing to implement a renderer based on the existing
> code structure; for instance, I'm convinced that a cairo backend
> would provide much nicer 2D plots than OpenGL, and is almost
> as much toolkit agnostic as OpenGL.
This approach has exactly one disadvantage: I'll have to duplicate some code 
of existing renderer in my rendering module. If Octave graphic-related data 
structures get changed, same changes will have to be done to each renderer, 
and it can be quite difficult for me to change my renderer properly.
But if I get convinced that this is a relatively minor problem, I can give up 
the idea of abstract renderer.

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