The idea of glamor is to leverage an existing OpenGL driver in order to implement the 2D acceleration required for an X server, and then in the future one only need to create an OpenGL driver. But how well does the existing mesa/i965 driver handle the task of accelerating glamor for cairo – a task best suited for the 3D pipeline and pixel shaders of the GPU? With the first patches to implement accelerated trapezoids for glamor, I decided to find out.
I ran the usual cairo trace benchmarks, including a couple of new ones to highlight areas of poor performance that have come to our attention, so measuring the throughput of various applications which use cairo against the glamor (with and without the trapezoid shader enabled), SNA and UXA ddx backends on a small selection of Core processors, from a lowly i3 Arrandale to the thoroughbred i7 IvyBridge. The results were then normalized to the performance of UXA on each system, so that we can directly compare the performance of each proposed backend to the current driver. A result above the centre-line means that the driver was faster than UXA, below slower.
Between the impedence mismatch between the Render protocol and OpenGL, that mesa has not been optimised for this workload and that glamor itself is still very immature, therein belies the simplicity and appeal of glamor.
cairo-ickle 