Anonymous user
Graphics stack: Difference between revisions
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→Historical Development
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In order to cut the time further, developers at Xerox PARC developed a technique called 'Bit BLT', in which a part of the image is prepared as a mask and only the mask is drawn to the video buffer. Other techniques, such as hardware sprites (which were drawn directly to the screen, bypassing the video buffer entirely) were also developed, but were mostly used in dedicated gaming and video editing systems.
I mention all this to get to compositing. Up until 2006 or so, the act of compositing for a window manager was done mainly as a 2-D action, and generally was focused on a) determining what parts of the display have changed, b) determining which parts of the screen were observable,
With the introduction of 3-D layered UIs such as Aqua and Aero, the issue of combining things became much more complex, leading to the need for a separate compositor layer. Most major window managers today have a 3-D compositor, and for a time it was almost impossible to get good performance from one without a dedicated GPU, meaning software rendering was out of the question even for the basic GUI, leading to issues that previously were mostly seen in gaming.
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