SNA Sandy Bridge Is Quick To Beat UXA Too

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SNA Sandy Bridge Is Quick To Beat UXA Too

There were huge SNA performance gains on Ironlake over UXA in the most recent testing that happened last night. Curious to see how the SNA 2D acceleration architecture is working for Sandy Bridge graphics hardware, for which it was originally intended, here are some new benchmarks...

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

[przemoli]

GtkPerf seam to favour UXA on Gen5/6. Bug or feature ?

[liam]

I'm curious why QT has been affected less than cairo with the transition.
I would imagine that ickle has a nice test suite and uses that a basis (the test suite being heavy with cairo), perhaps, along with general architectural improvements. However, I wonder if the qt 2d library (sorry, I forgot what it's called) has been designed to be less sensitive to driver issues (i.e., targets the minimum features one should expect from any driver). Since qT has a cairo backend (perhaps not well maintained, but should still be present), I wonder how that could fare.
Something I just noticed is that gtk doesn't seem to have a testing suite. There looks like there is an abandoned one in sourceforge (that is the one michael uses), but not an official one. How sad is that? This is very similar to the general problems with gnome testing (although that is at least being addressed somewhat with complete unit testing and sanity checks). I suppose the problem is lack of manpower and interest. Similar to the documentation crisis

[JS987]

I'm curious why QT has been affected less than cairo with the transition.
I would imagine that ickle has a nice test suite and uses that a basis (the test suite being heavy with cairo), perhaps, along with general architectural improvements. However, I wonder if the qt 2d library (sorry, I forgot what it's called) has been designed to be less sensitive to driver issues (i.e., targets the minimum features one should expect from any driver). Since qT has a cairo backend (perhaps not well maintained, but should still be present), I wonder how that could fare.

Qt doesn't have cairo backend, but cairo has Qt backend.
Qt4 has native (X11), raster and opengl backend.
Qt5 has only raster backend.

[liam]

Qt doesn't have cairo backend, but cairo has Qt backend.
Qt4 has native (X11), raster and opengl backend.
Qt5 has only raster backend.

Gah! You're right. I reversed ends
Are you sure qt5 dropped the opengl backend?

[JS987]

Gah! You're right. I reversed ends
Are you sure qt5 dropped the opengl backend?

Qt5 has limited opengl backend, but QPainter can't use it.
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2012/04/03/qt-5-alpha/

The QWidget based stack continues to work as in Qt 4.x, based on QPainter. QPainter does however support less backends than it used to. It is now limited to SW rasterization (Raster backend) for drawing to the screen, pixmaps and images, an OpenGL backend for GL surfaces and a backend for PDF generation and printing. The platform dependent backends using X11 or CoreGraphics are gone.

[liam]

Qt5 has limited opengl backend, but QPainter can't use it.
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2012/04/03/qt-5-alpha/

What's going on? Are they having development issues? Dropping those backends, like Coregraphics, seems like it would make it harder to target specific platforms natively.

[smitty3268]

What's going on? Are they having development issues? Dropping those backends, like Coregraphics, seems like it would make it harder to target specific platforms natively.

I don't think you're supposed to use QPainter at all anymore in Qt5. They want you to use QML on top of an OpenGL scene graph instead.

[JS987]

I don't think you're supposed to use QPainter at all anymore in Qt5. They want you to use QML on top of an OpenGL scene graph instead.

Exactly. Morons from Nokia/Digia/whatever want force QML crap after crippling Widgets.

[Ericg]

Exactly. Morons from Nokia/Digia/whatever want force QML crap after crippling Widgets.

"QML Crap" ? Its even easier to create user-interfaces, they automatically scale to smaller displays, you can do everything you could with QtWidgets, its automatically hardware accelerated, platform independent because its written in javascript, and carries ZERO legacy cruft.