kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> IMHO, we shouldn't remove anything that helps to deal gracefully with the
diversity of situations (like a virtual machine), graphics hardware and
video drivers... and their possible bugs ! (as stated about X11/Mesa).

The fallback engine we use today does not have feature-parity with the
accelerated engine, and that is not an easily-solvable problem.
Continuing to support it will continue to hold us back.

Putting aside the issue of virtual machines (our stance is that we don't
need to spend effort on supporting VMs because KiCad itself should run fine
on the host OS), we need to push forward into more modern
hardware-accelerated graphics APIs in order to make it possible to
implement some desirable features, help performance on large designs, etc.

The idea is that instead of being stuck on some "lowest common denominator"
OpenGL, we can instead for example use DirectX on Windows and Metal on
macOS.

-Jon

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 3:02 PM Steven A. Falco <stevenfalco@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> On 1/11/22 02:33 PM, pmx wrote:
> >
> >
> > Le 11/01/2022 à 19:25, Steven A. Falco a écrit :
> >>> I don't think the dialog would help any in the situation you are
> describing with the artifacts on the screen. It was only shown on first
> start, so it wouldn't give the choice in future runs (which would be after
> you notice all the artifacts). You can change the rendering backend in the
> preferences pane though, so you can switch back to the fallback graphics
> that way.
> >>
> >> I'm describing two situations.  One is the artifacts on my desktop, and
> one is the segfault on VMs.  As long as the window opens and is somewhat
> usable, then one can select fallback graphics easily from preferences, as
> you said.  The bigger problem is on the VMs where it crashes before the
> window gets a chance to even open.  I'll look at the issue you linked and
> see if that helps.  I'll also try a test build from the tip of the 6.0
> branch and see how that behaves.
> >>
> >> I'm more concerned that fallback graphics might be removed entirely at
> some point.  Hopefully accelerated mode will be bullet-proof before that
> decision is made.
> >>
> >>     Steve
> >
> > Unless there is much work involved to keep both backends working in the
> future, I strongly feel that a fallback graphics engine is a must and
> should be kept alive, even if this requires some (moderate...) effort.
> >
> > IMHO, we shouldn't remove anything that helps to deal gracefully with
> the diversity of situations (like a virtual machine), graphics hardware and
> video drivers... and their possible bugs ! (as stated about X11/Mesa).
> >
> >
> > @ Steven :
> > About the possibility to choose a graphics backend, in any situation,
> and indeed before a segfault  happens 😁 :
> >
> > What about a command line option (when launching Kicad), to force a
> specific graphics backend, including a "safe" fallback ?
> > Should be quite straightforward.
>
> The segfault is fixed in the latest 6.0 code, so I guess there is no
> longer a need for either the dialog or a command.
>
> However, some of the visual artifacts are still happening even with the
> latest 6.0 code, therefore the fallback graphics mode is still essential.
>
> I've added another video showing what it looks like when I resize the
> pcbnew screen.  Please see comment
> https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/10375#note_807446302 and
> https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/uploads/0aed9475350c1665d0cc200187536121/simplescreenrecorder-2022-01-11_14.29.16.mkv
> for details.
>
> I'm a little concerned that new users seeing these artifacts won't know
> what to do about them, and may give up.
>
>         Steve
>
>
>
>
>
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