Multibuffer extension gone

Deron Johnson Deron.Johnson at Sun.COM
Thu Nov 11 13:13:21 PST 2004


I was very involved in the implementation and specification of
Multibuffer. It was eventually abandonned in favor of DBE because it
didn't address the needs of 3D hardware devices. The device developers
and theOpenGL community didn't want to deal with the extra hair that
more than 2 buffers entailed. And the buffer swapping semantics of MBX
weren't what they wanted. DBE provides a model which is more along the
lines of what SGI originally put into IrisGL and OpenGL. I have never
heard of anyone using Multibuffer for a serious application and I would
be astounded to hear of any application in current use that uses it.

Jim Gettys wrote:
> I seem to remember Keith telling me that there were still a few things
> that Multibuffer could do that DBE cannot.
> 
> We should understand if work needs to be done in DBE to ensure
> everything can be done that should be done...
> 				- Jim
> 
> On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 16:59 -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> 
>>Sebastien wrote:
>>
>>>After failing to use the DBE (double buffer extension) I tried my luck
>>>with the Multibuffer extension. This works on Solaris and other kinds
>>>of unix but not for Xorg anymore as the extension is no longer be
>>>available. Why was it be removed? Can MBE be restored?
>>
>>Looks like Multibuffer was obsoleted/replaced by DBE:
>>   The Multi-Buffering extension described here was a draft standard of the
>>   X Consortium prior to Release 6.1.  It has been superseded by the Double
>>   Buffer Extension (DBE).  DBE is an X Consortium Standard as of Release 6.1.
>>
>>Solaris carries around a lot of old extensions in the name of preserving
>>backwards compatibility.
>>
> 
> 
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