I have some news from the graphics trenches, but as I am under fire I will be very brief and use a picture instead.


Original Flickr location

What is seen on the shot above is Maverick Meerkat, more-or-less stock EfikaMX edition, with a more-or-less stock 31.14.20-efikamx kernel from the gitorious repo, running two EGL windows side-by-side, one hosting an ES2 context (left) and the other a VG context (right), respectively. What can be guessed from the picture, is that the left window is entirely a product of the z430, and the right - of the z160, both GPUs found in the imx515, and hence in my netbook (which produced the screenshot today). What is definitely not possible to tell from the picture, is the fps measures of each window - ~12 fps for the bumpy ES2 loop, and ~15 fps for the feline VG loop. Now, while I cannot claim to know the theoretical ceiling of the VG loop on the z160, I have a good idea about the one of the bumpy ball, and it's ~12.5 fps of rendition alone, assuming zero swap-time, as per the z430 (app is effectively a special-case shader torture test for SoC GPUs). In other words, the ES2 window gives a sustained fps close to its _zero_swap_time_ ceiling. While the VG window draws a few kilobytes worth of vector paths at 15fps (I'm not kidding about the size of the assets, check the tiger demo sources).

Or, IOW, what we have here are two EGL contexts, of 3D and 2D nature, respectively, outputting simultaneously at some fairly low swapbuffer overheads.

Here the alert reader would say, 'Wait, while the stock imx EXA driver shipping currently with the Maverick EfikaMX is no slouch itself when it comes to visualizing ES contexts, it fails at running a windowed VG context. So what the heck is that screenshot showing?..'

/martin out

ps: sorry about the apparent screen tearing seen on the shot, but it's rather difficult to grab steady pictures of volatile-content windows under a stacking X wm.

pps: I was recently promoted in rank, from a PowerDeveloper to a full-time position at Genesi. Imagine the firepower I have at my disposal now ; )