Bryce Harrington wrote:
My own knowledge of how hardware rendering works is rather limited, else I'd be happy to help. One thing I've heard is that most hardware graphics cards are designed for 3D rendering rather than 2D, and involves hardware chips for performing calculations for triangles and meshes, which is key for 3D graphics but not 2D. However, since 2D is by definition simpler than 3D, there are tricks that can be done... unfortunately I have no clue what those tricks are.
Two directions you may find topical to this (at least as far as how hardware rendering works) are game programming (gamasutra.com for instance), and info about X.org's 3D graphic hardware acceleration.
Maybe others have better tips...
Hope this helps, Bryce
Thanks for the response.
Maybe a quick explanation is in order. I often create drawings with tens of thousands of nodes, or other complexities, which severely drain cpu cycles. Basically, what I'm looking for is a hardware setup that most efficiently does the calculations for the graphic rendering (maybe I'm using rendering incorrectly, if that solely means showing data on screen - I guess what I mean is the calculations determining what should be shown on screen.) I'm looking for high hardware performance for vector / bitmap apps in 2-D.
I assume that when I make changes to my drawing in Inkscape (for example, the nodes on a spline curve), the calculations are done on CPU (as is evidenced by my CPU usage stats). So, my first question is what is the connection between 2-D calculations and hardware?
A similar question is this: is there any advantage to having certain graphics hardware over others (assuming we're talking about modern video cards) for using 2-d graphics apps? In other words, does having more memory, higher bandwidth, faster clock speed, etc make any difference whatever in the time it takes to remove a node from a spline or blur a shape?
I'm assuming the answer to the last question is either "no" or "complex no". If I am correct, my next question would be: What is the single most important part of hardware to consider for speeding up Inkscape performance.
Please pardon the vagueness of these questions, I'm really trying to grasp what I can and turn it into something that is coherent.
Thanks for your help.
Joshua