GMA500 vs. G3 software render

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 13:21 +0200, Adam Pribyl wrote:
> While I consider the latest development on gma500, present in many Atom 
> base netbooks, a great success and would like to say thank you to 
> developer(s), G3 software render negates all this for gnome shell as this 
> is extremely slow on Atom. With the fallback mode the G3 is working very 
> well on gma500. But the obvious question is, beside the questionable 
> future of acceleration on gma500 - what is the future of the fallback? Is 
> there still a list of devices that should use fallback "by default"? If 
> yes, then I would nominate the gma500 for it, as this is really horrible 
> experience, making many users scared, just after live CD/USB boot.

Well, the problem there is that the determining factor in how fast
software rendering is is, obviously, not the graphics card - the whole
point of software rendering is to *bypass* the graphics card - but the
CPU. We can't blacklist systems from using software rendering on the
basis that their graphics cards are slow, that's kind of missing the
point.

I don't know if there's a plan to blacklist systems with sufficiently
'bad' CPU performance from using software rendering, or if ajax is of
the opinion that just about anything should be able to run Shell
acceptably via software rendering and if a system doesn't, there's a bug
that needs fixing...ajax, is there an overview here?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net