Text rendering fixed

Hi,

as I explain in my last commit, the rendering bug where text appeared as blank
rectangles was a bug in my code, not in your driver. Now it’s fixed. Could
you please check again on the machines where you experienced visual bugs and
tell me if text rendering now works for you? Especially Geoff with your ATI
card and Ross with your Intel card.

Assuming it now works for everybody, this means we will be able to stick with
my TextRenderer. No need to fall back to QGLWidget::renderText. This is good
news, renderText is still very slow in Qt 4.3, actually it’s even slower than
in 4.2 and part of that is caused by the API itself (no beginText/endText
methods) so it won’t get quickly fixed. Another new issue in 4.3 is that it
causes the GLWidget to freeze for a few seconds the first time it’s called.

On the other hand, I’ve made and posted to kde-devel a patch for Qt enabling
outlined text in renderText. Even if Trolltech accepts it, it won’t solve the
performance issues in renderText; but at least it’ll address one of the
issues in renderText.

To give vague numbers:
on my software-only setup, with a molecule of ~20 atoms, when the dynbsengine
and debugengine are enable, enabling the label-engine has the following
impact on performance:
– with TextRenderer: framerate drops by 10%
– with renderText: framerate gets divided by 3, i.e. it drops by 70%.
So TextRenderer is much faster.

Cheers,
Benoit

Tested the new engine on the older machine we’re using and the text renders
nicely now, no blank squares, and getting 120+ FPS compared to the 10 we
used to get with renderText. Haven’t seen Ross today but if I do i’ll get
him to try it out on his macbook.

One thing i noticed was that the text doesn’t display in the centre of the
atom but down and right of the centre (i.e. top left corner of text is in
centre of the atom). Sure thats a quick fix tho :slight_smile:

Good job, tis a huge improvement!

Cheers,
James

On 5/11/07, Benoît Jacob jacob@math.jussieu.fr wrote:

Hi,

as I explain in my last commit, the rendering bug where text appeared as
blank
rectangles was a bug in my code, not in your driver. Now it’s fixed. Could
you please check again on the machines where you experienced visual bugs
and
tell me if text rendering now works for you? Especially Geoff with your
ATI
card and Ross with your Intel card.

Assuming it now works for everybody, this means we will be able to stick
with
my TextRenderer. No need to fall back to QGLWidget::renderText. This is
good
news, renderText is still very slow in Qt 4.3, actually it’s even slower
than
in 4.2 and part of that is caused by the API itself (no beginText/endText
methods) so it won’t get quickly fixed. Another new issue in 4.3 is that
it
causes the GLWidget to freeze for a few seconds the first time it’s
called.

On the other hand, I’ve made and posted to kde-devel a patch for Qt
enabling
outlined text in renderText. Even if Trolltech accepts it, it won’t solve
the
performance issues in renderText; but at least it’ll address one of the
issues in renderText.

To give vague numbers:
on my software-only setup, with a molecule of ~20 atoms, when the
dynbsengine
and debugengine are enable, enabling the label-engine has the following
impact on performance:
– with TextRenderer: framerate drops by 10%
– with renderText: framerate gets divided by 3, i.e. it drops by 70%.
So TextRenderer is much faster.

Cheers,
Benoit


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