Greetings,
I have just upgraded to Fedora 15 and although my GPU-related tasks seem much faster, with updated free drivers, my CPU is put under more strain by this modern system (and GNOME 3 Fallback, as Shell looked at my video card and ran off screaming into the night). This is mostly minor for most things, and switching to OpenBox instead of Metacity can increase my Nautilus performance back to my prior Fedora 12 levels, but my Gambas programs are still running at reduced speed - strangely even in the highly minimal Blackbox environment.
Now, I know this should be helped with Gambas 3 and its supposedly much faster run-time, but for now I think my priority should be making my programs more efficient. I am still looking into 2D acceleration through OpenGL (as OpenGL tasks, as I said, are running as well as ever if not better), with the help of the Gambas Forums' tommyline, but this is proving more complicated and requiring more changes than I had first hoped (namely, rendering GUIs through SDL rather than tool-kits like GTK or QT). Anyway, now that you are all (by all I probably just mean sholzy
) filled in on the background, here is my idea:
One of the main inefficiencies in my engines is how they interact with drawing areas is how it redraws. Rather than clearing the screen and placing everything down afresh, it simply splats the new set of graphics down on top of the old. Now, I do this because otherwise you get the old ghosts staying on and so redrawing the background each time covers them up. However, I can easily see why this is now causing troubles on my admittedly increasingly obsolete laptop (I am starting to save up for a new Lenovo somewhere down the line now that my machine is fully maxed out). Does anyone know of any clear commands for drawing areas, particularly any of which you know do not cause flickering, undue slowdowns and artefacts? Thanks.
