4Sight, X or NeWS?

[Jim Helman]

We have a 4D/70GT, a wonderful machine that is damn fast for lots of
things.  Sadly, X is not one of them.  The X support is EXTREMELY SLOW
for doing things like scrolling a window.  It takes several seconds to
scroll an 80 column, full screen height window.  I'm hooked on
gnuemacs with mouse and was very disappointed when I realized the
speed of 4Sight's X11 support makes the machine unusable for this and
many other X applications.  It might get better in a release (it
improved somewhat in the last release) or it may be a fundamental
problem with doing bitblt style operations on the GT hardware.  (Any
comments from SGI on this?)  In any case, it's forced me to do all my
editing using X11 on a nearby VaxStation GPX.

I only use the SGI screen for actually running my graphics programs.
This is safer anyway, since while debugging a graphics program, a bad
graphics library call can cause the window manager to die and take the
whole console session with it.

I don't know if 4Sight's NeWS has better pixel performance, but
normally I would expect X to be better than NeWS for raster image
operations, since X is built around a raster imaging model.

Jim Helman
Department of Applied Physics
Stanford University