This is a demo of how to use the cairo-glitz-glz OpenGL accelerated
renderer with Mapnik.  It also has some rough performance gathering
functions for comparing cairo-glitz-glx to AGG.

This is not pretty code, it is a quickly assembled hack to test that
the cairo-glitz-glx renderer even works at all, and to get some basic
performance data.

To run this code and actually produce an output image requires an
unreleased version of cairo though, because the latest release
versions (1.8.8) failed the test suite horribly for the glitz backend.
So if you try this and get blank images, try upgrading pixman, cairo,
and cairomm.  The versions I used were all from the latest in the
respective git repos around end of May 2009 / early June 2009:
  pixman-0.15.11+ (git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/pixman)
  cairo-1.9.1+    (git://git.cairographics.org/git/cairo)
  cairomm-1.0.8+  (git://git.cairographics.org/git/cairomm)

I installed each of those packages, and mapnik (from SVN trunk) into a
new prefix, and ran my tests with that code.

Running on Linux (Ubuntu 9.04), with the NVIDIA 180.44 driver and a
GeForce 9500 GT rev 161 card (1GB), I was able to produce valid output
images.  However, the performance on the world borders data set (the
Hello World example on the Mapnik site), was pretty bad.  The AGG
renderer out-performed the cairo-glitz-glx renderer.  The glitz
renderer was about 8 times slower (AMD X2 BE-2400 cpu / 2GB RAM) in my
very rough benchmark testing.

Feel free to contact me for more info.
-James
 <jflemer@alum.rpi.edu>