[vtkusers] Mac OSX issues -- X11 rendering speed, dylib load time

[Mumit Khan]

Those of you following VTK CVS, VTK builds out of the box on MacOS X/X11.
The test results are very promising, but there are a few issues.

I've been trying to figure out why the rendering speed is so horrible on
my TiBook (1GHz/1GB), quite a bit slower than using XFree86/XDarwin
release. Are others seeing this as well? A search in the Apple X11 list
says " ... OpenGL on X11 for Mac OS X is currently limited to the display
frequency. We have removed this limitation and will be part of the next
release." This is good news if that is indeed the cause of the slowdown.

The other issue is that when you build shared VTK, the load time is
horribly slow. The testing for example takes at least twice as long as the
static case. Prebinding here will certainly help, but as a new MacOS X
user, I'm not sure how to approach this when configuring VTK. It would
be nice to have CMake configuration automatically do this. There are
all sorts prebinding options when linking, and I don't understand these
quite yet -- so suggestions/help welcome.

The load time issue is on Cygwin/Windows as well, and "rebasing" the DLLs
there will help. For those using Cygwin or Mingw, you can explicitly set
different base addresses for the various DLLs, or use
--enable-auto-image-base to let the linker pick one for you. I'd be
interested to hear if this helps load time.

Regards,
Mumit