Compositing Window Manager - Compositing and 3D Effects in Operating Systems

Compositing and 3D Effects in Operating Systems

In compositing, 3D effects could be applied on windows to provide 3D desktop effects. Modern compositing window managers uses 3D hardware acceleration. Compositing window manager software communicates with graphics hardware via programming interfaces such as OpenGL or Direct3D.

The earliest widespread implementations using this technique were released for the Mac in Mac OS X 10.2, and for Linux in a Luminocity prototype. Currently, window managers using OpenGL include Compiz, KWin, and the Quartz Compositor, while Desktop Window Manager currently uses DirectX 9. OpenGL is still not fully supported in hardware, so performance of OpenGL-based compositing should continue to improve as hardware improves.

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