On Thu, 2010-09-30 at 16:08 +0100, Jeremy Henty wrote: > I would *not* recommend using clutter for 3D modeling software. neither would I. > At > work I recently had to profile various approaches to GTK canvases > (gdk, foocanvas, goocanvas, clutter, gtkglext). We write genome > browsers so we *have* to render thousands of items quickly. I imagine > 3D modeling software would have similar constraints. We gave up on > clutter because of its performance. Not only did it render slowly but > creating a new clutter item was O(number of already existing items). it's a scene graph: what did you expect? :-p granted, we're using the painters algorithm when we should be using more efficient ways of submitting geometry to the GPU - and we're working into implementing that[0], but at the end of the day any actor needs to be reachable through a graph. if you want to draw elements you might want to use a single actor and then use a VBO through the Cogl API - but, then again, you can use GL directly with GtkGLExt. it would make sense to use Clutter for the main modeling view if and only if the rest of the application UI was using Clutter. > GtkGlext was the only approach that offered any hope of significantly > improving on good old foocanvas. clearly, since you need to drop down into raw GL, and that's all GtkGLExt provides. > Clutter seems to be focussed on eye-candy. "eye-candy" has generally negative connotations. Clutter is meant to be used to create compelling and dynamical user interfaces; it's an equivalent to CoreAnimation on Quartz and WPF on Win32. would you create a 3D modeling software using CALayers? > BTW, if you profile clutter then be careful: for most toolkits you > time the expose event handler, but in clutter that just sends an alert > to a separate clutter animation event stream and triggers a paint > event handler. Make sure you profile the right thing! on X11 you get an expose event for real windows; in Clutter, the only Window, as far as X11 is concerned, is the one implicitly created by a Stage. gtk+ 2.x too has moved away from sub-windows; and in 3.x gtk moves away from expose events delivered to widgets, in favour of a Clutter-like approach of top-down "draw" calls sent to each widget. ciao, Emmanuele. [0] http://wiki.clutter-project.org/wiki/Cogl_Render_Lists -- W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi _______________________________________________ gtk-list mailing list gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
