= AGC - or Accelerated Graphics Context =
AGC is an initiative to support hardware acceleration in WebKit, at a lower level than today's accelerated compositing.

Right now the architecture looks something like the following:
Document -> Renderer -> Compositor -> Platform-specific layer system (QGraphicsView, CoreAnimations, Chromium layers...)

... where the compositor is invoked for CSS opacity/transform animations and 3D transforms.

The idea is to share the layer system across platforms, with a common GLES2 implementation, and to have the following as platform specific parts:

 1. '''Content rasterizer''': each layer's content is still handled in software by the platform.
 2. '''Setting up the GL context''':  The web-view has to initiate a GL context and make it current before letting WebCore render into it
 3. Optionally, a platform-specific implementation of AGC.

== The purpose ==
The purpose for this is to make it easy for ports to use the accelerated-compositing feature of webkit, without having to write a whole scene-graph library. The theory is that WebCore already retains the scene-graph, so there's no need for an additional scene-graph library underneath it, and what's needed is simple translation from the model to a paint sequence.

== The API ==
AGC is a low level API tuned to what GPU and blitter hardware can actually accelerate, unlike the GraphicsContext API which is more of a classic 2D software API. The only primitives available to AGC are '''Texture''', '''Surface''' and '''Quad'''. The idea is that the backend for AGC would know how to draw a texture on a surface in a given quad (which is usually represented as a rectangle + matrix), and the frontend, which is GraphicsLayerAGC, would translate the retainable-scenegraph model it gets from WebCore into a paint sequence that includes almost exclusively mapping textures between surfaces (other functions may include rudimentary clipping).
This allows, for example, accelerated reflections and accelerated masks with multi-texturing.


== Files ==
Currently in [http://gitorious.org/~noamr/webkit/noamrs-webkit/commits/AGC]
See:

{{{
platform/graphics/AcceleratedGraphicsContext.h
platform/graphics/GraphicsLayerAGC.h
platform/graphics/GraphicsLayerAGC.cpp
platform/graphics/AGCOpenGL.h
platform/graphics/AGCOpenGL.cpp
platform/graphics/qt/AGCQt.h
platform/graphics/qt/AGCQt.cpp
}}}