What is the fastest way to draw a 2D array of color triplets on screen?

Question

The target language is C/C++ and the program has only to work on Linux, but platform independent solutions are preferred obviously. I run Xorg, XVideo and OpenGL are available.<

Answer 1

If you're trying to dump pixels to screen, you'll probably want to make use of sdl's 'surface' facuility. For the greatest performance, try to arrange for the input data to be in a similar layout to the output surface. If possible, steer clear of setting pixels in the surface one at a time.

SDL is not a hardware interface in its own right, but rather a portability layer that works well on top of many other display layers, including DirectX, OpenGL, DirectFB, and xlib, so you get very good portability, and its a very thin layer on top of those technologies, so you pay very little performance overhead on top of those.