On Jan 17, 2007, at 2:36 PM, Matthias Drochner wrote:

> 1. Is it desirable at all for the X server to offer a GLX extension
>    if there is no real hardware support? If the clients are doing
>    the hard work, there is a chance that the load is spread among
>    multiple CPUs or cores, while the singlethreaded X server would
>    be a bottleneck if multiple clients are using it. There is
>    probably less data to be transferred with GLX but for a local
>    client this doesn't matter much. I didn't see a difference in
>    alsolute performance with glxgears or glclock.

Seems like if the hardware doesn't do it, the capability should not be  
sent to the clients.  For precisely the reason you specify.  It also  
seems more fair from a basic CPU scheduling perspective -- the thing  
that wants all that fancy stuff is going to get penalized, not the  
same process that also needs to render your mail reader and word  
processor.

-- thorpej