From: Sukru TIKVES sukru@cs.hacettepe.edu.tr
NVidia has its own desktop utility for Windows. It works fine. It also has a "keystone" function which allows you transform (stretch, skew, resize, etc) your "entire desktop" freely.
Actually, there is a GUI management program in the nVidia driver suite. Unfortunately, by the way X works, some of these things the Win32 GDI allows is not always possible in X, for a variety of reasons.
There is a new X extension called RENDER. It comes disabled with xorg server, however once you enable the extension and install necessary user level tools, you'll have hardware accelerated (ie: true) transparent windows.
Unfortunately, it's a hack. It uses unused video memory as a faster, local store than main memory, but still doesn't address the reality that you should be using your GPU functions instead of memory tricks.
I.e., a window is simply a set of vectors and/or bitmaps on a plane. It doesn't matter if it looks like 3D to a user, or is perfectly perpendiular and appears to be 2D (but is still using 3D in the GPU, even if no Z buffer).
From simple concepts to the Xgl server to FreeDesktop Cario which
brings full aliasing, vector graphics on planes as well as traditional bitmaps on planes, it is the X11/GLX's equivalent to QuartzExtreme.
IMHO, I think Sun's got the right idea. Go 3D everything, solve the inconsistency, hacks upon hacks and overall inefficiency of layers upon layers with Looking Glass. What really sold me that Sun is "thinking ahead" is that even the input is 3D.
The "technology demo" of Looking Glass doesn't do their innovative approach an ounce of justice. It's not eye candy, it's efficiency.
See my previous post. I've tried the setup on a gentoo installation and it works very well.
On nVidia cards with the nVidia driver, but that's about all right now. It largely has to do with the fact that nVidia driver has that proprietary memory management module in the kernel that is tied to the X11/GLX driver/libraries.
nVidia knows what it's doing, because they solved the problem 5+ years ago.
-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org