>> As of 1.4T, the tcx driver in tree needed only minimal tweaks to
>> work with the S24 enough for me to build an Xs24.  (Comparatively
>> little use of the acceleration - what acceleration there is - but it
>> handled 8bpp and 24bpp on the same screen.)
> In my experiences, running Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, or 2.7, this frame
> buffer was painfully slow.  I found a TGX+ SBus frame buffer and a
> spare monitor, and attached them to the same box, so i had a "fast
> screen" as well as the slow S24 "colorful screen."

> But in my recollection, if someone has never used this frame buffer
> before, one will be disappointed by how slow it is.  Especially when
> compared with any modern video card.

Well, if by "modern video card" you mean "peecee game rendering engine
comparable in processing power to the 18GHz Hexium peecee it plugs
into", well, all I can say is, duh. :-)

In my experience the S24 is about as fast as any other 8bpp framebuffer
used without significant acceleration, when doing 8bpp stuff, and (not
surprisingly) somewhere around a third to a quarter that speed when
doing 24bpp stuff.  (Similar remarks apply to the cg14, the other
framebuffer I've done a dual-depth X server for.)

This probably means visibly slower than the cg6 (eg, your TGX+),
especially a cg6 running with an X server written by people who
actually knew how to take full advantage of the hardware.  (The cg6 can
do things like region scrolls totally on-card, supposedly limited in
speed only by bandwidth to video RAM; the S24 has some acceleration for
such things, but not enough to help nearly as much.)

> Perhaps the old Solaris driver was written badly, but from the
> discussion, it sounds like the card was also oddly designed.

It looks to me as though it were a stripped-down preliminary version of
something that could have been really useful if it had been implemented
in its full glory.

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