2010/1/6 LukasT.dev@...400... <lukast.dev@...400...>:
MMX instructions degraded performance? How does that happened?
There are several possible reasons: new processors have other instructions that are faster, or the 'vanilla' instructions got better while MMX didn't, or the MMX-based implementation was substandard. I think currently MMX is a legacy technology, with priority being given to SSEx and other more powerful SIMD instruction sets, so their implementation might not be a priority.
And would you tell why do you consider OpenGL huge white elephant and waste of time?
It is a waste of time to use a very low level API that's definitely not designed for our use case, when we can use a much higher level API (Cairo) that already has some experimental support for HW acceleration. Therefore if we want improved HW accel support, we should put it in Cairo rather than in Inkscape, so it will benefit more people. OpenGL is definitely not a white elephant in general, but trying to use it directly in Inkscape is.
Regards, Krzysztof