Karol Krenski escribió:
Hi list,
Does inkscape depend of how fast my GPU is? From what I understand GPU allows for hardware matrix/vector calculations and vector graphics is all about those. But does inkscape use the GPU or does it use CPU rather? I heard Macromedia Flash depends on GPU.
Karol
To the best of my knowledge, Inkscape does not make use of the GPU for its 2D calculations, and rather uses the CPU. This is not an Inkscape issue, per se, but rather a GTK one. The way that GTK could do vector graphics acceleration is through the use of *Cairo* which is a specialized rendering engine for vector graphics elements which can work with GTK. I'm not familiar with the internal workings of Cairo, but to the best of my understanding, it does use 2D hardware acceleration which greatly improves vector rendering speeds. Also Cairo can make use of more advanced graphics acceleration through OpenGL with the aid of Glitz (a helper library). Again, I'm not sure how does all the stuff works and ties together, but my understanding is that Inkscape is starting to support Cairo as its rendering backend through GTK. I'm not completely sure, though, and Inkscape may not be actually using Cairo as the rendering backend yet (though I believe reading about support for Cairo in Inkscape somewhere).
So short answer: No Inkscape does not depend on your GPU as it does not make full use of either 2D or 3D hardware acceleration for the vector operations.