[Mapserver-dev] [Fwd: More MapServer test results]

[Titus von der Malsburg]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 08:53:03AM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> - Mapserver (gd) is just abnormally slow at rendering
>   - Possibly our gd is compiled with poor or missing optimization

This is something a friend of mine and I was wondering about a few days
ago:  Virtually nobody in the Open Source world seems to take advantage
of the potential of extensions of the instruction set like sse1, sse2,
altivec and suchlike?  At least sse2 could be worth the investment
since both amd _and_ intel support it.  The gain should be notable.

Rendering libraries like cairo will more and more use the GPU to do
onscreen drawing.  Right now offscreen drawing is uninteresting since
the path from the graphics card back to the main memory is slow.
However this isn't true for PCI Express graphics cards.  Therefore it
might be possible that we'll see libraries that use GPUs for efficient
offscreen rendering in some future.

To go one step further: Clusters of graphics cards a imaginable as well.
Simply put additional cards in your machine and have the software that
is able to use them :-)  You ask why anyone should want to do this?
GPUs are highly specialized/optimized and relatively cheap.

Just daydreaming,
	Titus