XRender

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

xclock uses the render extension for rendering translucent and antialiased clock hands

The X Rendering Extension (Render or XRender) is an X Window System extension to implement Porter-Duff image compositing in the X server.

[edit] History

It was written by Keith Packard in 2000 and was first released with XFree86 version 4.0.1.

[edit] Features

It provides several rendering operations and also does alpha blending. At present it is primarily used to implement antialiased fonts, but is expected to be used to implement drop shadows and translucency.

Geometric figures are rendered by client-side tessellation into either triangles or trapezoids. Text is drawn by loading the glyphs into the server and rendering as a group.

[edit] Performance

It is designed to target the 3D graphics capabilities of newer video cards.

[edit] References

• The X Rendering Extension (Keith Packard, Latest Official Specification)
• A New Rendering Model for X (Keith Packard, USENIX 2000)
• High Performance X Servers in the Kdrive Architecture (Eric Anholt, USENIX '04)
• Xorg Glossary (X.Org)

This software-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.