EVALUATION

Shortly after writing the initial evaluation for this RFE back in April 2007 I
did more prototyping on the OGL/D3D implementations of PhotoComposite.
While it is indeed possible to accelerate those advanced blending modes
using shaders, it necessarily requires reading portions of the destination
(framebuffer) into a temporary texture since a) compositing operations in
Java2D happen between an arbitrary source and the contents of the
destination surface and b) the destination pixels are not directly accessible
by a pixel shader in either OGL or D3D.  This step of copying destination
pixels into a temporary surface is relatively fast since it is a VRAM->VRAM
operation, but it is less than ideal and requires adding a bunch of complex
code to the hardware pipelines in Java2D.

Also, since this RFE was first filed we have since delivered the Blend
effect as part of JavaFX, which offers all of the blend modes originally
proposed for PhotoComposite in a form that is much more easy to accelerate
because the Blend inputs do not involve the destination (framebuffer), i.e.
they are already available as source textures.  I think these blend modes
are better provided as a high-level effect rather than trying to shoehorn
them to work with the existing Composite API in Java2D.

Therefore, my current inclination is to scale back the changes originally
proposed for JDK 7 and instead make small additions to the existing
AlphaComposite API with at least an ADD mode since a) that is the most
commonly requested blend mode that isn't already provided in AlphaComposite,
b) it fits in fairly well with the existing AlphaComposite rules, and
c) it can be accelerated easily in both the software and hardware pipelines
(without the use of shaders or reading back from the framebuffer in the
hardware case).  We might also be able to add a simple MULTIPLY mode, but
that will require some more investigation.

I think this approach (small enhancements to AlphaComposite) would serve
the needs of Java2D developers quite well, while keeping the implementation
burden low.  Developers who want access to extended blend modes can use the
Blend class from JavaFX, which offers the right amount of functionality in a
form that can be easily accelerated on the GPU.
                                     

EVALUATION

Yep, this is planned for JDK 7.  In fact, most of the groundwork is already
in progress and/or complete.  First we need to get the new PhotoComposite
API integrated with functional software loops (see 5094232), then the changes
in 6531647 will lay the foundation for PhotoComposite acceleration for the
OGL pipeline.  Around that same time we should have the new D3D9 pipeline in
place, and we can add acceleration for PhotoComposite for that pipeline as well.