[SDL] 2D Accelerated Hardware Support?

[Mattias Engdegård]

>Most of the more common video cards are supported via. hardware
>acceleration in 2D.  In fact, most 2D accel was available before 3D
>accel was available for a particular card.

Unless you are running SDL + Linux, of course.

>Goto www.xfree86.org and read the documentation for each chipset to find
>out if it is accelerated.

X11 acceleration != SDL acceleration. If you want 2D acceleration under
Linux, all of the following conditions must be fulfilled:

1) XFree86 4.0 or later
2) video hardware supported by XFree 4.0 (a limited set right now)
3) video hardware for which XFree supports DGA2 (a further subset of 2)
4) SDL must be configured to take advantage of DGA2
5) root privileges!
6) you don't expect anything but rectangular blits/fills or colourkeyed
   blits to be accelerated

yes, *then* you will have 2D acceleration. Maybe the fbcon target is/will
be accel'd as well, I have no information about that.

Don't interpret this as defaitism; see it as a challenge to improve the
current state of the art. I personally believe 5) is unacceptable, and more
operations (particularly alpha blits, stretching /rotating blits) should be
made available, when supported by the hardware. DRI shows some promise,
even though the support is narrow and the design not uncontroversial.