| 摘要 |
An efficient method and system for displaying integrated transparent objects and animation with a window, such as an Internet Web page is described. The present invention implements a plugin-control, such as a Netscape plugin or ActiveX control, in the host program, such as a Web browser, wherein the plugin-control provides at least one graphics buffer in addition to the buffers used by the host program. The plugin-control can function according to the host program Application Programming Interface (API) for the plugin-control under which the at least one additional buffer is used to composite a "compositing plane" containing the transparent objects and animation with the host program window and where the resulting composited scene is returned to the host program buffers as part of the regular host program draw pipe. Additionally, the host program API may be circumvented and the resulting composited scene may be written directly to the front buffer for display on the display device. In particular, in one embodiment, the plugin-control implements the at least one additional buffer it provides in the system memory in order to improve the performance of compositing images with many transparent pixels with a Web browser window. This improvement results from both the faster reading of data from the system memory than from video and the higher number of read-modify-write operations where a large number of transparent pixels exist and from current Web browser implementation of buffers solely in video memory. |
