At the recent European X.Org Developers Meeting KDE developer and Trolltech employee Zack Rusin presented a new acceleration architecture named Exa (eyecandy X architecture) for X.org. Being based on KAA (KDrive acceleration architecture) it's designed to be an alternative to the currently used XAA (XFree86 acceleration architecture) with better acceleration of XRender which is used by composite managers for desktop eyecandy effects. The next X.org release which is expected to contain Exa is planned to be released in September.
Making existing graphic card drivers using XAA take advantage of Exa is said to be easy and Zack volunteered to, besides bringing Exa into X.org, to port all unmaintained graphic card drivers as soon as he gets the respective hardware in his hands. Exa is meant to improve the desktop experience and bring users some much needed eye-candy while Xgl, an X-Server layered on top of OpenGL is being worked on.
Comments
I dont think X.org will be fine
Pardon? What do you mean?
Oh My God
AWESOME. I bet kde withh be the first to take advantage of the features. Then Enlightenment then Xfce and gn0m3 :p
Well GTK 2.7 already has support for cairo, and cairo can use glitz. Glitz matches the XRender specification, so will take full advantage of all this sort of stuff.
As far as I know kde is estimated to have cairo support in KDE 4..
At least that's the info I've pieced together ;) so don't take my word for it
Gtk+ 2.7 is a development version. So better wait until it's released and the first GNOME version depending on it and tested against Gtk+ 2.8 is released.
KDE doesn't need cairo because Qt4 offers the painting framework Arthur (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-arthur.html) that can also use OpenGL.
Somebody will probably create an cairo backend for Arthur but it will be only one of the choice.
mission accomplished!
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2005-August/009168.html
Good thing someone is working on this now that xgl has had a bit of a setback. Of course, exa seems to be part of the reason for the setback. boo hoo.