wishlists

[Ed McNierney]

Attila -

I think that's a helpful way to think about hardware acceleration.  It's
more likely to make new and improved rendering techniques possible and
practical than it is to improve the speed of producing what's currently
supported by MapServer.  But if you're making 3D map images with
realistic illumination, then that's something that could DEFINITELY
benefit from hardware acceleration.

     - Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Developers List [mailto:MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU]
On Behalf Of Attila Csipa
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 6:10 PM
To: MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-DEV] wishlists

On Monday 14 February 2005 22:24, Ed McNierney wrote:
> 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

In theory, there are parts you could use. These could be for example
rotating,
scaling and blending raster or already rendered vector layers, use of
hardware anti-aliasing, etc. I'm not that much into low level
accelerator
programming so I wouldn't how how much you would gain (if anything) by
these
operations, or how much memory bandwidth could be saved by, say, caching
raster layers in accelerator memory, etc. Perhaps someone proficient
with
OpenGL could give a rough analysis ?