🚀 go-pugleaf

"Daniel J. Pavon-Moreno" <djpavon@neoholistic.org> writes:

>Hi, people, I'm new to this group.

>  I've got this very old/obsolete (but so cool) SS20 that I use mostly
>as an X terminal. It came with the Leo framebuffer which is unbearably
>slow (how a supposedly 'gfx accelerator' can be so slow is beyond me),
>so recently I switched to the onboard SX fb (8 MB VSIMM). Having read
>some old Sun brochures, and being the cg14 a local bus framebuffer, I
>expected the SX's performance to be at least on par with an old S3 PC
>gfx accel card from around 1995, but actually it's much slower:

Remember that the SX/cg14 has *no* 3D hardware acceleration. It's strictly a
very enhanced 2D 24-bit framebuffer with a fancy pallette DAC and MMU
interface.

Remember also that in 1993/94 when the Sparcstation 20 was Sun's premium
machine, the 8 MB VSIMM gave the SS20 graphics performance which had almost
never been seen before in the Unix workstation market. SGI was about the
only place putting lots of R + D into graphics hardware/software development
at that time.

You will not find any PC framebuffer from the 1993/4/5 period with anything
like the same level of capability, particularly the same level of
integration, that the SS20's on-board framebuffer provided. Sure the raw
performance is lacking because of the host platform it's designed for.

Make absolutely sure you configure the Xservers file correctly too - to get
the best performance you *must* run Xsun in Truecolor mode. This means you
need to specify:

-dev /dev/fbs/cgfourteen0 defdepth 24 defclass TrueColor

or similar in the line of the Xservers file which starts Xsun on the local
display.

If you don't, Xsun will come up in PseudoColor mode and the colormap
processing will hinder performance.

>My hardware setup is: SM71 cpu, 256 MB RAM, 2 GB hd, 8MB 60ns VSIMM,
>Solaris 2.5.1, running at 1152x900.

Using a single SM71 CPU doesn't help either. You *need* as much CPU
brute-force as possible when using any 24-bit video platform, and since the
SX/cg14 is tied directly into the local buses on the SS20 system board,
better CPU performance translates directly into better video performance.

Regards,

Craig.
--
 SUN RIPENED KERNELS - Surplus Sun Microsystems Equipment, Parts + Accessories
    Waterfall, NSW, Australia - Operated by Craig Dewick - Founded in 1996
Main site: www.sunrk.com.au - Ebay Shop: www.ebayshops.com.au/sunripenedkernels
  Ph: +612-9520-2547 - Fax: +612-9520-2557 - Mobile: 04-2163-0547 (int. +614)