JavaFX versus AWT/Swing Hardware Acceleration

[Steve Hannah]

>
> Prism. We do mix HW and SW in that we generate masks from a path in SW,
> but we cache that on the card and render it using shaders.
>
>
Can you describe roughly how the caching works?  I understand that the
alpha mask is stored in OGL as a texture, but there are an infinite number
of possible paths to be masked. How many textures can be stored at once (on
say an iPhone)?  I'm guessing JavaFX uses some sort of LRU caching
algorithm for these textures?

I ask this because I've been playing around directly with the Pisces C
library directly to generate alpha masks and render them using shaders.  I
can see a performance increase of 4x in using alpha masks rather than full
argb pixels (due to 1 byte per pixel instead of 4), but I'm curious about
other savings that JavaFX makes with this method.

(Hopefully this question doesn't take this thread too far off topic...  my
hope is that the answer to this question will help shed light on the
original poster's question also).

Steve