Chris.Rusbridge@levels.sait.edu.au (02/08/91)
In article <9102020056.AA25076@hydro.Saic.COM>, xpert@hydro.saic.COM (xpert_news) writes: > > Another serious problem with the Decstation 5000/PX appears to > be its extremely poor performance on some imaging applications > such as the XDataSlice. For such applications teh 5000/PX is > decidedly inferior to a Decstation 3100 rnning MIT's X11R4 > server. > > I have received e-mail message from a dozen users of DS 5000/PX > from throughout the North America confirming my observations. > We have reports from at least two software companies of serious graphics performance difficulties with their ports to DECstation 5000s with the PX (8 bit plane) and PXG 24 bit plane options. We have a large number (>20) of DECstation 5000s on order. Most are equipped with PX (8-plane) accelerated graphics, and several with PXG graphics plus 24 planes. These machines were intended to run the software in question, among other software, and the reports are causing us serious concern. We would very much appreciate any advice from users with actual experience of these PX and PXG 24 bit plane options, to help us work out how to respond. One image processing software company claims the PXG 24 plane "board design is flawed when trying to display raster data. DEC is seriously considering an alternative 24 bit plane native display... it is highly likely that the PXG in an 8 bit mode would not be acceptable". Another company reports their product "will not run okay in 8 bit mode using DEC 24 bit card". We also have reports from the second of these companies of poor graphics performance with the PX board. The performance with the PX option is "definitely less than that of the CX option or even of the DECstation 3100". Other comments indicate that the degradation is from 30 seconds with CX to 20 minutes with PX, and that attempted workarounds were unsuccessful. The majority of performance problems seemed to be related to XDrawSegments and XFillPolygon. Chris Rusbridge Academic Computing Service Manager (City, Levels and Whyalla campuses) University of South Australia AARNet: Chris.Rusbridge@sait.edu.au Phone: +61 8 343 3098 Fax: +61 8 349 4213 Post: The Levels, SA 5095 Australia