[Qgis-developer] What about OpenGL renderding ?

[Vincent Picavet]

Hello,

Le jeudi 24 octobre 2013 09:54:06, kimaidou a écrit :
[..]

> In web mapping contexts, major improvements are made in 2D vector rendering
> speed by using WebGl technology, such as in upcoming OpenLayers 3. As a
> user point of view, improvement seems huge compared to classical DOM or
> more advanced CANVAS renderer.
> 
> What about using graphic card to help improve rendering performance in QGIS
> ? Would this help a lot, or at the contrary would this be a dead-end ?

We would probably begin with porting QGIS to QT5, as OpenGL support has been 
added to QT5 and improved in 5.1.
See for example : 
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtopengl/2dpainting.html

Otherwise, reimplementing an pure OpenGL rendering engine seems a big effort.
And we still would want to have a classic renderer for non-accelerated 
hardware.

One really interesting thing is that it would open the door for viewing 3D 
objects in QGIS. As for now to be able to see PostGIS 3D objects we had to 
develop our own external 3D viewer (horao). For that to happen we would need 
real 3D geometry support in QGIS too.

> I have seen the funding for having a multi-threaded rendering, this is why
> this idea came in mind. In twitter, Pirmin told me Marco made some advanced
> test. What were the conclusions ?

Interested in preliminary results as well.

Vincent