Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 16:55 +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> But you can't tell everyone whose GNU flash animations are slow:
> tough! you should get an open-gl graphics card, can you?
> Is hardware opengl really going to be a requirement to play flash
> animations?

It's pretty much going to be a requirement full-stop. The vast, vast
majority of PCs out there have some form of 3D support built into them,
and most desktops will need it in some form in the next few years. 

We already rely on some form of hardware acceleration I think; a
non-accelerated X server is very slow. What we're talking about is a
change from using of 2D functions (e.g., blitting) to 3D (e.g.,
compositing).

As an example of the kind of development that needs 3D hardware
acceleration:

	http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6498

3D-type operations are really useful for doing things like drawing SVG
objects (a standardised alternative to Flash), fonts, but it also makes
the application a lot more consistent cross-platform apparently. 

Of course, you don't need 3D hardware in order to do that kind of
drawing, but it's very slow without use of it :(  There is already a
version of Mozilla that requires GL, and various toolkits, font
rendering systems, etc. There is a GL X server in heavy development, and
obviously most games but also many multimedia programs use GL for video.
You just can't run a fully GL desktop off a software runtime, and it
looks like everyone is going GL...

Cheers,

Alex.