🚀 go-pugleaf

kaleb@thyme.jpl.nasa.gov (Kaleb Keithley) writes:

>In article <3241@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> steve@cs.hw.ac.uk (Steven Salvini) writes:
>>

>On a separate, but related subject, Keith Packard, in his discussion of
>Server internals at Xhibition a couple of weeks ago, indicated that he has 
>tested, and found that (almost) none of the accelerated frame buffers (Sun, 
>or otherwise) provide any usable performance improvement for GUI type drawing 
>activity.  In a nutshell, he said that the overhead of setting up the 
>accelerator pipeline, putting the instructions into the pipeline, and then 
>closing the pipeline, negated any possible advantage.  

>Kaleb Keithley                               kaleb@thyme.jpl.nasa.gov

>No flashy sig. No clever quips. No famous quotes. This space for rent.

Both unlikely and untrue.  I added sun GX support to the X11r4 server
and it was sufficiently much faster that I was very unwilling to give
the card back when the owners wanted it back.  Painting and scrolling
were very fast.  I could have tall emacs windows and go through files
by sitting with my fingers om C-z and M-z, no problems.  Wallclock
performance on many things was better than 2D performance on a
Personal Iris (which really *did* surprise me).  I was developing
a drawing program, and dragging large, complicated shapes round on
the screen was a joy.

Now, admittedly, the GX accelerator does seem to have been designed
with X support firmly in mind, but even so, I was quite impressed.

If only I didn't dislike using X so much:-)

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