Color SPARCstation 1+ fast enough without GX? -- yes!

Bill Mitchell sunquest!whm at uunet.uu.net
Fri Jun 15 15:11:32 AEST 1990


I posted a note several days ago asking whether the performance of a
non-GX 4/6X might be adequate for a windowed application (in X) that does
some modest graphics.

I've received 19 responses thus far and they all say about the same thing:
non-GX 4/6X performance is entirely adequate for most applications.

It was pointed out that the X11R4 server makes no use of the GX board.  In
fact, with X11R4, the GX board emulates a CG3, the dumb frame buffer.
There seems to be a 10-15% performance loss with a GX versus a CG3 when
used with X11R4.  (Based on some x11perf figures posted in comp.windows.x
by Bob Scheifler on 1/6/90.)

Several persons said that OpenWindows does make use of the GX board and
version 2.0 of OW is supposed to be pretty reasonable.

Many thanks to all who replied; contact me for a free lunch the next time
you're in Tucson.

Bill Mitchell				whm at sunquest.com
Sunquest Information Systems		sunquest!whm at arizona.edu
930 N. Finance Center Dr.               {arizona,uunet}!sunquest!whm
Tucson, AZ, 85710                       sunquest!whm at uunet.uu.net
602-885-7700



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