On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 12:47:08AM +0100, Matthias Buelow wrote:

> BTW.: I don't know if it's just bad driver support in Sol2.5.1 and Sol8,
> but the "acceleration" of the tcx graphics is a misnomer; the beast
> is the slowest graphics I've seen in a workstation for quite a while.
> It's truecolor, yeah, nice, but almost unusably slow. Still NetBSD
> support would be nice, imho.

This was discussed not long ago on NetBSD and suns-at-home lists.

I ran an S24 on SunOS in the past and it ran fine.  Not screaming fast,
but it was usable.  Another identical machine in the office at that time
was dog slow.  I have no idea why, both ran SunOS 4.1.3 I believe.
On the slow one I could actually watch the windows draw sometimes.

I ran it on Solaris 3 years later and it was even worse, but exactly why
I don't know.  Could have been drivers, or could have just been because
Solaris was so slow on the machines in the first place.

In any case, it seems there is no way to get >8-bit fast graphics on
a low-end SPARC.  I have been told there are cards that are different
that run fast, but I've yet to find on, and in discussions in the last
year it seems that is the general consensus.

It's kind of strange, because as far as bandwidth goes, they have more
than some PC cards I used in the past which seemed to run much faster.

Something must be broken with the S24 cards.

Of course, I would love for someone to prove me wrong so I could
have a decent display on mine.

-- 

UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon@widomaker.com