[SDL] SDL 1.3 - SDL_Texture or SDL_Surface?

[Sean Middleditch]

On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 21:07 -0700, Sam Lantinga wrote:

> > All the other features talked about here, I don't think I've seen them wanted
> > elsewhere. Having worked with OpenGL, I personally think we can add these
> > features in without bloating the API.
> 
> I'm not sure how.  Pretty much all of these features require 3D hardware to
> implement them with decent speed these days.  At that point you might as well
> be using a 3D API.

That isn't true at all.  Doing efficient software implementations of
these algorithms is most definitely possible.  In truth, doing a lot of
these things in software is actually easier than trying to figure out
how to get OpenGL/D3D to do it for you, especially if you want to also
apply other fancy effects without relying on modern shader hardware.

Look at the Enlightment crew and their imaging libraries.  Full
software-only stack (as well as various accelerated hardware backends),
and last I checked, their software stack was faster than any of the
hardware ones.

Especially on Linux/UNIX where even the "good" OpenGL drivers still tend
to suck at accelerating a lot of basic 2D operations.

> 
> See ya,
> 	-Sam Lantinga, Lead Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment
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