[SDL] CSDL with quad-buffering and a seperate flip-thread

[Martijn Melenhorst]

>Most of the discussion, has imho, been pretty pointless since the 
>solutions depend on the behavior of specific, hardware, drivers, and 
>OSes.... There hasn't been a portable way to synch to vertical retrace 
>since the first svga cards came out.
>
>Some where around here I have a nice modex triple buffer renderer that I 
>wrote back in '93 or '94. It was obsolete by the end of '95 and so was 
>this whole line of argument....

I do not see this discussion as being obsolete: The people who joined this discussion were looking for a way to get a smooth-running system on 
every OS out there, on every hardware. I think that discussion applies especially in these days. Getting the moment of a vsync, by interrupt or 
whatever, is therefore a crucial topic. It was already obvious from the contents of the posts that there still is a lot of confusion about these subjects, 
and that especially people using Linux OS-es get varying results and possibilities all the time.

As for your triple buffer solution: As we dicussed earlier, a triple buffer solution is only possible if you can do a driver/hardware-managed "flip-on-
vsync" of those surfaces without holding the program to wait for a VSync. This is not a possibilty with the standard SDL functions, and that started 
the whole argument. Ofcourse maybe you couldn't care less, and just want the user to see a tearing-effect on this screen, but I do care about this. 

The solution I made actually works, by the way, and it will on every graphics card, as long a it is running Windows, I guess, since those drivers do 
have a vsync functionality...