Author Topic: Additional graphic layer render backends (Read 3848 times)

Pol · « **on:** August 13, 2009, 01:33:55 pm »

DirectX, Xlib, windib, framebuffer ?

(+ 8bpp/palette functionality)

Reason is for 'legacy' hardware performance issues...

For example, I have an old COMPAQ PRESARIO 5140..
Windows 2000 Professional
400 Mhz Pentium II
384 Mb RAM
4 MB ATI 3D Rage LT Pro AGP 2x

It has OpenGL 'support', but is *extremely* slow. Rendering a -single- small sprite once per frame results in only 13 FPS... Whereas if I use SDL (which uses either the windib/DirectX backend, not sure at this point) I can blit about 600 sprites per frame at a constant 20 FPS.

Just saying.

Laurent · « **Reply #1 on:** August 13, 2009, 02:02:29 pm »

SFML is not designed for prehistorical hardware, and I think there's no point doing it as there are alternatives. Just use SDL

Pol · « **Reply #2 on:** August 13, 2009, 03:29:10 pm »

Yeah, I suppose adding extra backends would change the 'S' in 'SFML' from 'Simple' to 'Super'.

Laurent · « **Reply #3 on:** August 13, 2009, 03:45:31 pm »

It would introduce many bugs, make the whole library harder and harder to maintain, waste my precious time, and bloat the internal code (look at SDL). For 0.01% of users.

I prefer focusing on making the API stable enough, implementing the important missing features, and thinking about this kind of stuff later. Maybe for SFML 3