toby@r2.cs.man.ac.uk (09/15/89)
I have an Ardent Titan to use, and I want to exploit its computing power,
really using its display just as a frame buffer. Does anyone know the most
efficient way for me to write to the display? (This is for a Mandelbrot
viewer).
I've heard X is very slow for shipping pixels around.
Thanks!
Toby
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Toby Howard Computer Science Department, University of Manchester,
Lecturer Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, U.K.
janet: toby@uk.ac.man.cs.p1
internet: toby%p1.cs.man.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
earn/bitnet: toby%uk.ac.man.cs.p1@UKACRL
uucp: ...!ukc!mup1!toby voice: +44 61-275-6274
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Toby Howard Computer Science Department, University of Manchester,
Lecturer Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, U.K.
janet: toby@uk.ac.man.cs.p1
internet: toby%p1.cs.man.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
earn/bitnet: toby%uk.ac.man.cs.p1@UKACRL
uucp: ...!ukc!mup1!toby voice: +44 61-275-6274
--------------------------------------------------------------------------rick@hanauma.stanford.edu (Richard Ottolini) (09/17/89)
In article <6495@ux.cs.man.ac.uk> toby@r2.cs.man.ac.uk writes: >I have an Ardent Titan to use, and I want to exploit its computing power, >really using its display just as a frame buffer. Does anyone know the most >efficient way for me to write to the display? (This is for a Mandelbrot >viewer). > >I've heard X is very slow for shipping pixels around. > >Thanks! >Toby a (1) Ardent shipped a new X server in June that was eight times faster than before. The old was based on the sample MIT server. The new uses device- dependent routines. It is now about the same speed as DEC 3100's X which uses the same CPU chip and is also optimized. (2) Both Ardent's new X, Dore, and some alpha-release scientific visualization tools call an underlying device driver called tg. There is a debate withing Ardent as to whether they will ever document this for TITAN users. You can get a sense of it by looking at the ioctl flags in /usr/include/machine/tigr.h. It seems to be a nasty, but very fast graphics driver involving queue and buffer synchronization. (We have two TITANS.)