When to use OpenGL

Hello www-amaya,

Given that Amaya can use OpenGL, this site about the benefits and
drawbacks of using OpenGL to accelerate Java2D may be of interest.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/agile2d/

>> OpenGL provides a number of interesting hardware acceleration
>> capabilities, including alpha blending, double buffering,
>> antialiasing, and texturing, which can be used to deliver
>> impressive two-dimensional graphical applications. There are
>> downsides. In particular, OpenGL does not perform well with very
>> large images, large quantities of text, or dynamic 2D polygons.
>> Some applications perform better under OpenGL acceleration. Others
>> perform significantly worse.

>> ... drawing simple lines and filling rectangles is significantly
>> faster under OpenGL. Most image operations are faster too. And as a
>> general trend, notice that operations involving alpha blending are
>> much faster under OpenGL.

>> Importantly, drawing generic shapes and text is sometimes slower
>> under OpenGL. The issue with general shapes can be somewhat
>> mitigated by using immutable shapes - Agile2D caches immutable
>> shapes using OpenGL display lists and can render them significantly
>> faster (on the order of 50,000 shapes per second using the same
>> test conditions above).

-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group