The Skia 2D Graphics Library From Google

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Skia 2D Graphics Library From Google

One of the emails landing in the Phoronix inbox over the weekend was in regards to the Skia 2D Graphics Library. It was an email asking if we've ever heard of it and how the performance of Skia compares to that of Qt and Cairo. For those unfamiliar with Skia, here's a small scoop on this open-source 2D drawing library...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTM0Mw

[markg85]

Hi Michael,

I'm glad you took my mail and made a nice overview about Skia. And there is even more interesting stuff about Skia. There is a Qt backend implementation for it (heavily wip though) : http://blog.rburchell.com/2010/11/qt-on-skia.html

So that really makes benchmarking something highly interesting! Since i personally expect it to beat Qt raster and it has the added benifit of native OpenGL acceleration thus also beating Qt's QGraphics* classes.

Note: I didn't (yet) contact the person making the Qt Skia implementation but it would be very interesting to know how stuff is progressing in that area.

Regards,
Mark

[markg85]

O btw. Your info about SkGlCanvas is wrong. The header of SkGlCanvas states this:

// Deprecated. You should now use SkGLDevice and SkGLDeviceFactory with
// SkCanvas.

http://code.google.com/p/skia/source/browse/trunk/include/utils/SkGLCanvas.h

[ioannis]

distro packages?

does any major ditro include it in their repos? I've checked Ubuntu and it's not there

nice choice of name by the way. "Skia". I presume it's the Greek word for 'highlight' (in this context. More commonly used for 'shadow')

[Smorg]

Why did google decide to go with their own library? They already use GTK for the Chrome UI. Since Cairo is already used and shared by so many projects, investing in it would be mutually beneficial with contributions from both Google and others unless there's some technical reason it couldn't be reused.

[Delgarde]

Seconding what smorg said - what advantages does this have over existing libraries? Cairo's been around for years, it's widely used, and I've not heard a lot of complaints about either performance or functionality. Why would I use this instead of Cairo?

[bridgman]

My impression was that SGL had also been around for a long time and dates back to a time when Cairo's was not particularly well established as a "standard rendering library either", although I could be wrong there.

Wikipedia suggests that Skia and SGL were already sufficiently well established in 2005 (although I had never heard of it ) that Google purchased the company with the intent of open sourcing SGL back then.

[liam]

Iirc the gnash guys use skia for drawing and they said that its big advantage is that it is a scanline based drawing library which they claimed is the current state of the art when it comes to speed. So from that I'd expect it to beat anything not scanline based.
As for the gpu acceleration I'll simply reiterate what, I think it was, Mathew Garrett demonstrated with Cairo ogl acceleration: you can't throw anything on the gpu and hope to get speedup.

[Shimon]

Which version of OpenGL is Skia using nowadays? (Chromium 45)

Can it use just 1.x or is 2.0 mandatory?

[Ansla]

I'm no OpenGL expert, but looking at the code it seems to require the GL_ARB_sync extension and in turn that one requires OpenGL 3.1.