Framebuffer vs. X11

written by Mickey on 2007-12-08

Putting some new fuel to the neverending fire -- whether the (undebatable) performance drawback of using a full-blown window system like X11 outweighs the benefits in flexibility; Just recently I built the Expedite benchmark utility (from the Enlightenment project) for my Neo1973 (266MHz armv4, VGA display, unaccellerated framebuffer).

Thanks to the Evas canvas abstraction, Expedite has tons of rendering backends, including ones for the framebuffer and X11. And here are the results of the jury:

I this is is quite shocking (I expected the framebuffer to win, but not by that far). With an average frame-per-seconds of 17 for the framebuffer backend and 11 for the X11 backend, this looks like X11 introduces an overhead of about 50% on my platform.I wonder how the directfb and SDL backends would score -- I'm going to do these eventually. I'm also curious in the results of Gtk+/X11 vs. Gtk+/fb as well as Qt/X11 vs. Qt/Embedded. I'll do that once I have nice benchmark utilities for the respective toolkits.

Surely this result only applies to unaccellerated framebuffers, hardware-accellerated xrender may win by far, but this is what we don't have right now. The question is, did we bet on the wrong horse here? Do we really need all the goodies X11 give us? Do we really need a windowing system abstraction on a phone? Do we really need to run multiple toolkits in parallel? What do you think?