Demystifying OpenGL Desktop Effects
My last blog post about the driver situation in the KDE Plasma Workspaces in version 4.5 caused quite some discussion. This is great and really required. But it also showed that there are quite some incorrect information about the current and future OpenGL compositing being spread. With this post I want to address some of the wrong assumptions I read, so that they won’t be spread any further and causing grieve to both the KWin developers and the driver developers.
1. The Plasma Workspaces require at least OpenGL 2:
Nothing changed: KWin still supports no compositing, XRender compositing and OpenGL compositing. Compositing is still an optional feature (but enabled by default if feasible) and that won’t change in the next years. Given the experience we have with enabling compositing by default it would be irresponsible in my opinion to require OpenGL for desktop computing. Being able to disable effects on the fly is an important and often used feature. The minimum OpenGL requirement is somewhere between OpenGL 1.1 and 1.3 and this has not changed since our first compositing release 4.0. OpenGL 2 features are only used for further optional features in 4.5, which are only enabled if the graphics driver supports it. In case of blur effect there is no requirement to OpenGL 2 at all as it only requires extensions already available for OpenGL 1.x.
2. KWin uses extensions unsupported by free drivers in 4.5:
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