whm@uunet.uu.net (Bill Mitchell) (06/15/90)
I posted a note several days ago asking whether the performance of a
non-GX 4/6X might be adequate for a windowed application (in X) that does
some modest graphics.
I've received 19 responses thus far and they all say about the same thing:
non-GX 4/6X performance is entirely adequate for most applications.
It was pointed out that the X11R4 server makes no use of the GX board. In
fact, with X11R4, the GX board emulates a CG3, the dumb frame buffer.
There seems to be a 10-15% performance loss with a GX versus a CG3 when
used with X11R4. (Based on some x11perf figures posted in comp.windows.x
by Bob Scheifler on 1/6/90.)
Several persons said that OpenWindows does make use of the GX board and
version 2.0 of OW is supposed to be pretty reasonable.
Many thanks to all who replied; contact me for a free lunch the next time
you're in Tucson.
Bill Mitchell whm@sunquest.com
Sunquest Information Systems sunquest!whm@arizona.edu
930 N. Finance Center Dr. {arizona,uunet}!sunquest!whm
Tucson, AZ, 85710 sunquest!whm@uunet.uu.net
602-885-7700richard@unipalm.co.uk (06/27/90)
> Unfortunately R4 does not support the GX. Until Sun will adapt Xsun to > there hardware (hopefully!) I use following little 'quick and dirty' > patch. It accelerates only simple bitblock moves within the screen, > but is very useful in xterm-scrolling and opaque-moves. Disclaimer : I work for XTech !! XTech is about to release (6th July) an X server based on X11R4 but ported to use the pixrect library (and hence the GX card) where it is efficient to do so. Some things, such as bitblts and line drawing is considerably faster, some things are quicker in native X. Overall, we were disappointed that the GX performance is not very fast. I would expect that any operation of reasonable size, (i.e. other than small rectangles) to be faster on a piece of hardware dedicated to the task of drawing fast graphics (and costs a large amount of money). While the GX is generally faster most the average speedup is not the 20 times figure that Sun have quoted to me on several occasions. One major benefit of porting to pixrect is that the server is about 1/2 the size, since it uses the shared pixrect library. This shows up particularly when running in a Sunview window, since they share the library. Richard Nuttall richard@xtech.uucp XTech, Cambridge, England ukc!acorn!unipalm!xtech!richard Tel: +44 954 211862 richard@unipalm.uucp