KDE SC 4.7 May Use OpenGL 3 For Compositing

An anonymous reader writes "KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers."

XRender and OpenGL 2.1

[Cyberax]

KDE can use XRender and/or OpenGL 2.1.

Nothing special about this

[xynopsis]

Just the need to upgrade how Kwin uses OpenGL currently to do rendering. Right now its still using the old OpenGL 1.1 - style rendering (fixed-function rendering pipeline) to a programmable one using vertex and fragment shaders. This way, it'll be easier to port it on embedded devices that uses OpenGL 2.0 by default

Re:bloat ware

[Anonymous Coward]

What?!

I use KDE 4 almost exclusively on a two year old machine with the desktop effects enabled and my machine does not crawl. The 3D effects of KDE 4 used to be very inefficient, but that was fixed sometime in the last year. Up until that point, I just used the simple solution of turning them off. If you don't have a relatively decent video card, then just turn the effects off. It isn't hard. KDE 3 had no built in 3D effects and certainly never made even my underpowered laptop, of the time, crawl.

Desktop effects in KDE 4 are easily turned off in a matter of seconds. They're highly customizable otherwise.

Not liking KDE is one thing, but making up random complaints isn't a valid reason.

Re:bloat ware

[Erikderzweite]

Eye candy in Linux DEs can make work a good deal smoother -- resources are better shared between CPU and GPU. Plus there are some very useful effects -- expo and scale plugins (both in Kwin and compiz). Transparency can come handy too. Granted, desktop cube is there just for show as there are wobbly windows, fire or water effects.

And advanced effects don't really add that much to boot time -- I still manage to stay within 30 seconds on a rather old hardware, even with P4-class PC.

Re:bloat ware

[Anonymous Coward]

my amd64 (p4 class) boots a gnome desktop in less than 10, KDE takes over 30 and studders like crazy (with a 512mb geforce 8800gt)

not sticking that on my main machine! puff doesnt help when your draggin ass

Stop your trolling folks, you're overreacting

[Danious]

Oh for god sakes people. Kwin provides pluggable back ends for rendering engines for compositing. Currently we support xrender and OpenGL 1.1, soon we will support the next version of OpenGL. Big deal. You can turn compositing on or off, or choose which engine is best for your platform. We will not remove the old engines or force everyone to use compositing. So stop your trolling.

Re:And for those older machines?

[Danious]

No, then you just carry on using OpenGL 1.1 or xrender

Re:And for those older machines?

[chowdahhead]

If such a change happened, I'd imagine there would be alternate rendering paths, just as you can fall back to xrender right now; old hardware likely won't be left out.

Re:And for those older machines?

[ingwa]

Let me assure you that Aaron is *not* generally thought of as being selfish and elitist. He is a very smart guy who sees the big picture in things and who also listens to other people a lot before he makes up his mind. He also has a good way with words, which may not go well down with people who have other agendas. Those of us who often interact and work with Aaron sees what an immense load of bullshit he has to put up with from anonymous cowards. We know he is a pleasant guy, and we not only like him, but also pity him sometimes for the flack he has to endure. Like the parent.

Re:Do not care

[Asic Eng]

Well there is now a KDE3 fork called Trinity: http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/ [pearsoncomputing.net] - they've maintained a KDE3 repository for Ubuntu for a while now, and want to start fixing bugs and making minor enhancements in the next stage.