Italian start-up Mazatech is shipping the first stable release of its hardware-accelerated commercial 2D vector graphics library for small-screen embedded devices. Mazatech says AmanithVG 1.0 implements the Khronos Group's OpenVG specification, using a pair of 3D APIs, also from the Khronos Group.

Despite its claims that AmanithVG implements the “entire” OpenVG 2D spec, Mazatech does not belong to the Khronos Group, and said it “makes no claim that AmanithVG is in any way a conformant nor compliant OpenVG implementation.”

The Khronos Group's OpenVG is an open graphics specification aimed at devices with user interfaces based on vector graphics. It defines a low-level API for vector graphics libraries, such as those associated with Adobe's Flash Player, or the W3C's SVG (scalable vector graphics) specification. OpenVG aims to enable “fluidly interactive 2D performance” at very low power levels, Khronos said.

Mazatech announced AmanithVG in August of last year, and then shipped a preview release a month later. Now, the company is shipping its first stable AmanithVG 1.0 release, and offering evaluation downloads for several desktop and embedded architectures and OSes, including embedded Linux.

Mazatech claims that using 3D hardware to accelerate 2D graphics can produce quality comparable to software rasterizers, while achieving speeds about 10 times faster — or, for embedded systems, consuming far fewer processor cycles. The AmanithVG library implements the 2D OpenVG 2.0 specification using two 3D specifications:

• OpenGL 1.1 to 2.0, using extensions where available
• OpenGL ES (embedded subset) 1.1 and 2.0

Now that AmanithVG is shipping, Mazatech is working on an SVG Tiny 1.2 player based on AmanithVG, the company says.

Availability

AmanithVG 1.0 evaluation builds are available now for a variety of embedded architectures. They have been tested on TI OMAP2420 and Freescale i.MX31 processors, using Linux, Windows CE 5, and Symbian, Mazatech adds.

Evaluation builds of AmanithVG 1.0 are also available for a variety of popular desktop environments, including:

• Win32 (x86), Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (this build requires SP1 runtime redistributable package vcredist_x86_sp1.exe available in the Support files section)
• MacOS X (universal binary), XCode 2.4
• Linux (x86) linked against libc 2.3 branch, gcc 3.3.5, compiled on a Debian 3.1 R5
• Linux (x86) linked against libc 2.4 branch, gcc 4.1.1, compiled on an Ubuntu 6.10
• FreeBSD (x86), gcc 3.4.6, compiled on FreeBSD 6.2

 
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