wishlists

[Ed McNierney]

Sean & Daniel -

CPUs only do one thing at a time, too!  Yes, if an accelerated graphics
card is installed in a server, and an application like MapServer is
using a library that uses that accelerator, then that accelerator can be
shared by all client requests.  Like any hardware resource, some
operations will be serialized, but the resource can be shared.

However, good old general-purpose CPUs do 2D graphics just fine, and I
don't expect MapServer to be able to gain much from any hardware
graphics acceleration.  There's a certain setup/communications overhead
to any hardware graphics acceleration, and that's usually more than made
up for by the complexity of the rendering operation.  If you're asking a
graphics accelerator to help you draw a fancy-looking 30-pixel-long
styled railroad symbol, it's unlikely to be much help.

     - Ed

Ed McNierney
TopoZone.com

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Developers List [mailto:MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU]
On Behalf Of Sean Gillies
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 4:08 PM
To: MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-DEV] wishlists

On Feb 14, 2005, at 12:04 PM, Daniel Morissette wrote:

> Sean Gillies wrote:
>>
>> * explore using Cairo instead of GD.  Cairo has the cartoline stuff
>> built in, and can take advantage of graphic accelerators.
>>
>
> "take advantage of graphics accelerators"? Do you mean the hardware
> graphics accelerators built into your VGA display adapter? Is there a
> way that a server could share the same graphics accelerator with 10
> concurrent requests?
>

I doubt it.  But some people are using mapscript for desktop apps and
it could be helpful to them.  Myself, I'm intrigued by the richer
graphic stroking and filling of Cairo.

Sean