Glitz
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is glitz. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
Glitz is an OpenGL image compositing library. Glitz provides Porter/Duff compositing of images and implicit mask generation for geometric primitives including trapezoids, triangles, and rectangles.
The semantics of glitz are designed to precisely match the specification of the X Rendering Extension. Glitz implements not only X Render features like component alpha and image transformations, but also additional features like convolution filters and color gradients, which are not currently part of the X Render specification.
The performance and capabilities of glitz are much dependent on graphics hardware. Glitz does not in any way handle software fall-backs when graphics hardware is insufficient. However, glitz will report if any requested operation cannot be carried out by graphics hardware, hence making a higher level software layer responsible for appropriate actions.
Glitz can be used as a stand-alone layer above OpenGL but is also designed to act as a backend for Cairo, providing it with OpenGL accelerated output.
Glitz was developed as part of a Master's thesis called "Hardware accelerated image compositing using OpenGL" by Peter Nilsson and David Reveman.
