Centralization of graphical awesomeness

[Helge Hafting]

Evgeniy Karyakin wrote:
> 2009/10/26 Carsten Haitzler <raster at rasterman.com>:
>> you want speed? you will need to give up something. if you still want it to
>> look nice, then drop pixels. its the simplest and easiest solution. its the
>> right resolution for that cpu anyway. the glamo will still hurt you, but not as
>> much.
> 
>    I'm sure everybody who has any professional connections with
> Freerunner+Glamo development already took all possible measures to
> solve this problem. But what concrete steps were taken to ease Glamo
> bottleneck? If its throughput is so narrow, can we lower amount of
> data flowing through it? 

Sure you can lower the amount of data flowing through it. Lowering
the resolution is one option that several has mentioned.

Another way is to draw less stuff overall:
* Don't draw anything that need several passes, i.e. transparency
* Don't draw anything unnecessary, i.e. "cute animations"
* Don't ecen think of 3D.
* Optimize the user interface.
   Never redraw "the screen" when drawing a smaller portion will suffice.
   Don't highlight an icon by changing
   the background color. (Lots of pixels).- Just draw a 1-pixel wide
   square around it, for example. (And make sure your drawing library
   doesn't do anything excessive behind your back, such as drawing the
   entire icon with that border - because that was "simpler" to
   implement.

The situation is not hopeless. The entire 640x480 16-bit display
is 614400 byte, or 0.6MB. 7MB/s means the entire display can
be updated 11 times per second if need be. In theory, anyway.
Anything updating a smaller
portion of the screen could be even more responsive.

Helge Hafting