Re: The big divide - graphics contexts and window servers

[Pete French]

> OpenGL is designed for 3D, and it's not happy with 2D. Most GL implementations
> don't accelerate 2D operations beyond throwing a quad on the screen, and some
> even leave it incomplete.

Are you sure about this ? I thought there wernt concepts of '2D' and '3D'
in OpenGL - you just provide a transformation matrix, and if that happens to
be 'flat' so that the points get mapped onto one plane then you have 2D and
the library knowns nothing about it.

> Also throw in the fact that on most non-professional implementations/cards,
> you can only have one direct-rendering window at a time.

Somewhat irrelevent - GLUT allows you to open and render into multiple windows,
so any implementation oif GLUT will let you do this. If people buy cheap
harrdware that does a crap job of rendering it then thats not our fault or
our problem. The top layers should be independent of the hardware. After all
a lot of systems will be using something like Mesa anyway as they dont have
hardware GL. Its a bonus if it exists, but the fact that it doesnt or is
badly implemented shouldnt bother us unduly.

> For anything beyond games and professional or scientific graphics systems,
> OpenGL is rather a joke.

Maybe - but all we want is a portable way to throw data at the screen, which
it provides. It would make a Windows port far easiier for starters, which has
to be a big bonus.

-bat.