At Pycon this year, Eben Upton made a call for graphics demos for the Pi to really showcase its potential.

I'd love to get the Spine runtime working smoothly on the Raspberry Pi.

It works with pyguts/spine-python, but I'm only getting about 4.5-5.5 frames per second. I've narrowed this down to pygame simply providing really awful performance on the Pi, and it's probably due to everything being software rendered.

Pygame has OpenGL hooks, but the Raspberry Pi uses OpenGL ES, so I'm fairly certain that Pygame isn't able to hardware accelerate the drawing calls on the Pi.

Eben did mention to me that they're planning on looking at optimizing Pygame on the Pi at some point, but he also mentioned that the OpenGL layer on the Raspberry Pi should be blazingly fast. I'll probably follow up with the foundation and let them know what I've discovered.

So over the weekend I hacked on my Pi and got a Python library called "pogles" installed and was able to run the test application that comes with it, which draws a red triangle on the screen.

I'll probably look for some more examples that layer on top of pogles, with and end goal of getting spine-python working with OpenGL hardware acceleration on the Raspberry Pi.

If anyone else has an interest in helping let me know.