[Christopher Heck]

Hi there,

I just dropped Apple some feedback using the feedback form on their Mac OS X homepage which I though I might share with you as well.

I was wondering whether or not it would be possible to use OpenGL to further accelerate important parts of the OS, especially Quartz 2D and the Aqua Interface.

Quartz Extreme has proven to be a success so far by basically treating every window as an OpenGL texture. With this, the window compositor has been OpenGL enabled and tremendously sped up the Mac OS X windowing environment.

Now, how about Open GL enabling parts of Quartz 2D and the Aqua Interface?

As for Quartz 2D, imagine you are working in Keynote. Most of the time you will manipulate graphic and text objects. For example, you scale, move and rotate graphics and make them transparent ... Right now all of this heavy compositing is handled entirely by the CPU. However, what if the graphic became an OpenGL texture and was pumped through the OpenGL pipeline?

Next, take the Aqua Interface itself. Why not make all elements like buttons, lists, scroll bars, ... OpenGL textures as well and have the graphic card handle everything from here? Or take fonts: Why not make every character of a font an OpenGL texture? (In fact that is how the shareware application GLTerm works to get its speed.)

All of this should speed up the Mac OS X user interface tremendously by shifting most of the graphic work away from the CPU to the GPU.

What do you think?

-- Christopher

[lookmark]

I think Apple is undoubtedly working on doing much more with QuartzGL for 10.3.

It's interesting to think about what opportunities a OpenGL-accelerated GUI would introduce for the GUI itself...

[Graymalkin]

Each view object (every widget in a window) could be made into a OpenGL texture and treated as such but the initial texture rendering would have to be done by the CPU so I don't think there would be much of a speed gain. Using OpenGL to control window compositing seems to me the fastest way to go about accelerating Quartz. All the window views are being generated by PDF descriptions, there's no way to really offload those calculations onto the GPU. GLTerm you pointed out uses X11 BDF fonts which are bitmap fonts and are thus easily rastered to a view image and then treated as OpenGL textures.

[sniffer]

Originally posted by lookmark:
I think Apple is undoubtedly working on doing much more with QuartzGL for 10.3.

And less on speeding up the experience on none-QE video cards.

[Gul Banana]

I think Apple's opinion on that is "Well, we're never going to sell another machine that can't handle QE anyway, so why bother"?

[Graymalkin]

Yeah it isn't like they sold a billion Powerbooks, clamshell iBooks, and Rev A-D iMacs or anything. I guess owners of these will never be happy with unaccelerated craptacular drivers. Sheesh.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Christopher Heck:
Hi there,

I just dropped Apple some feedback using the feedback form on their Mac OS X homepage which I though I might share with you as well.

I was wondering whether or not it would be possible to use OpenGL to further accelerate important parts of the OS, especially Quartz 2D and the Aqua Interface.

Quartz Extreme has proven to be a success so far by basically treating every window as an OpenGL texture. With this, the window compositor has been OpenGL enabled and tremendously sped up the Mac OS X windowing environment.

Now, how about Open GL enabling parts of Quartz 2D and the Aqua Interface?

As for Quartz 2D, imagine you are working in Keynote. Most of the time you will manipulate graphic and text objects. For example, you scale, move and rotate graphics and make them transparent ... Right now all of this heavy compositing is handled entirely by the CPU. However, what if the graphic became an OpenGL texture and was pumped through the OpenGL pipeline?

Next, take the Aqua Interface itself. Why not make all elements like buttons, lists, scroll bars, ... OpenGL textures as well and have the graphic card handle everything from here? Or take fonts: Why not make every character of a font an OpenGL texture? (In fact that is how the shareware application GLTerm works to get its speed.)

All of this should speed up the Mac OS X user interface tremendously by shifting most of the graphic work away from the CPU to the GPU.

What do you think?

-- Christopher

They would if they could, but current graphics cards just aren't up to the task. An ATI employee has hinted that NV40/R400 era hardware (the newest graphics cards are NV30 [GeForce FX] and R300 [Radeon 9500/9700) might be able to pull it off.