I have a lot of replies to this, but the back-and-forth format that HN has isn't the best for collaborative discussion. Imagine us sitting in a room with a whit

I have a lot of replies to this, but the back-and-forth format that HN has isn't the best for collaborative discussion. Imagine us sitting in a room with a whiteboard, rather than bickering at each other at loud volume. If you're ever in south bay area and want to meet up at a coffee shop, let's :) > Basically, my question is whether anybody is working on a solution for the hardware we have today, where there are hardware overlays, the GPU throughput is orders of magnitude higher than what's needed to composite a desktop Hardware overlays are... not that popular on desktop devices? You just stomp on the gas pedal with bandwidth and power consumption on consumer desktop gaming GPUs. Besides a couple YUV planes and a cursor overlay, you don't see that much in the way of CRTC capabilities on desktop. All of that's happening in the mobile space, because of power consumption reasons, where you basically have an SNES PPU in your CRTC with multi-plane compositing. I remain unconvinced that compositors need to add a frame and a half of latency. 16ms is a lot of time to render a frame, and composition isn't too difficult of a task. It just comes down to buffer handoff, which can be smoothed out over time. Similarly, the new flip-model isn't the thing that makes smooth resizing difficult, buffer allocation and resizing has always been a pain and racy on Windows/X11. This is one of the things that Wayland fixes -- it was actually the thing that caused Kristian to start Wayland forever ago. Presentation and timing is something I think should be possible, but I don't think it makes sense for every app to have to handle it. Multi-monitor scenarios are what make global timing difficult, and having per-monitor surfaces is just a pain to deal with from an API standpoint; if we did the work to have per-monitor timing information and split surface rendering, nobody wants to go through the work to set up two devices and present different ones at the right time. You might protest that all monitor timing is roughly the same these days, but someone hooking up their laptop to a projector, you get radically different timing. In many respects, I think graphics is in a local minima right now: it works well enough and we understand it well enough that nobody's really interested in pushing us to the next thing. VR/AR research might, but that's been relatively unimportant as a target platform, commercially.