I was surprised that the tile-based updates from VNC, Teradici, PCoIP etc. wasn't in the related work. In particular, a challenge with "send < smaller > updates

I was surprised that the tile-based updates from VNC, Teradici, PCoIP etc. wasn't in the related work. In particular, a challenge with "send < smaller > updates" rather than whole frames is how you decide to deal with massive updates where you'd end up causing more work / traffic than the whole frame approach. This post is focused on local compositing, but I think the same arguments apply as with the networked case: too many updates is actually worse than vsync, but the usual case of "just ship deltas" is amazing (for remote display you get the bandwidth and latency win, here you'd get latency/power/whatever). I think a low-level "updates" API would make sense for some sophisticated applications, but I'm not convinced that this quote holds: > I think this design can work effectively without much changing the compositor API, but if it really works as tiles under the hood, that opens up an intriguing possibility: the interface to applications might be redefined at a lower level to work with tiles. Seems like if you can show Chrome and VLC both working fine, that'd be a great proof of concept!