Because we have had several reports about significant performance
regressions since we enabled offscreen redirection by default for
handling correct opacity we are now turning this feature off by default.
We feel that clutter should prioritize performance over correctness in
this case. Correct opacity is still possible if required but the
overhead of the numerous offscreen allocations as well as the cost of
many render target switches per-frame seems too high relative the
improvement in quality for many cases.
On reviewing the offscreen_redirect property so we have a way to
disable redirection by default we realized that it makes more sense for
it to take a set of flags instead of an enum so we can potentially
extend the number of things that might result in offscreen redirection.
We removed the ability to say REDIRECT_ALWAYS_FOR_OPACITY, since it
seems that implies you don't trust the implementation of an actor's
has_overlaps() vfunc which doesn't seem right.
The default value if actor::redirect_offscreen is now 0 which
effectively means don't ever redirect the actor offscreen.
This adds a virtual to ClutterActor so that an actor subclass can
report whether it has overlapping primitives. ClutterActor uses this
to determine whether it needs to use ClutterFlattenEffect to implement
the opacity property. The default implementation of the virtual
returns TRUE which means that most actors will end up being redirected
offscreen when the opacity != 255. ClutterTexture and ClutterRectangle
override this to return FALSE because they should never need to be
redirected. ClutterClone overrides it to divert to the source.
The values for the ClutterOffscreenRedirect enum have changed to:
AUTOMATIC_FOR_OPACITY
The actor will only be redirected if has_overlaps returns TRUE and
the opacity is < 255
ALWAYS_FOR_OPACITY
The actor will always be redirected if the opacity < 255 regardless
of the return value of has_overlaps
ALWAYS
The actor will always be redirected offscreen.
This means that the property can't be used to prevent the actor from
being redirected but only to increase the likelihood that it will be
redirected.
ClutterActor now adds and removes the flatten effect depending on
whether flattening is needed directly in clutter_actor_paint(). There
are new internal versions of add/remove_effect that don't queue a
redraw. This means that ClutterFlattenEffect is now just a no-op
subclass of ClutterOffscreen. It is only needed because
ClutterOffscreen is abstract. Removing the effect also makes it so
that the cached image will be freed as soon as an actor is repainted
without being flattened.
This adds a conformance test for redirecting offscreen. It verifies
that the redirected actor has the right paint opacity, that it gets
redrawn only when the image cache needs to be invalidated and that it
ends up with the right appearance.
