This BOF is about how we get to rendering Nirvana. GNOME should be

• Smooth: Transitions should be continuous, we should never accept misdrawn intermediate states. The view of the desktop should be a "movie" of correct frames.

• Snappy: We should work hard to get to the response times documented in the HIG. < 100ms for most actions.

• Spiffy: Where appropriate we should enable slick, good-looking effects and tasteful eye candy.

The Composite and Damage extensions provide the basic server infrastructure for a much improved way of handling toplevel windows. Cairo will be the new rendering library for GNOME.

My Future of rendering in GNOME paper from GUADEC provides background on toolkit and GNOME level issues.

Some quite scattered notes about rendering with GTK+, X and metacity here