[coyotos-dev] Rendering: to float or not to float, that is the question?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On current screen-enabled embedded devices, hardware-assisted rendering
is rare and floating point units aren't that fast. This is changing, but
it is not clear (to me) how quickly.

Should the fundamental rendering model in Coyotos be based on OpenGL,
which represents a commitment to floating point (and a potential power
burden), or should we provide an integer-based rendering model as well?

I suspect this boils down to two issues:

  1. Power requirements
  2. Hardware rate of advance

The first clearly seems to favor availability of an integer API. The
second argues that we should forget the integer API, since it may be a
very grey elephant.

Opinions?

shap