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

[richard at unipalm.co.uk]

> Unfortunately R4 does not support the GX. Until Sun will adapt Xsun to
> there hardware (hopefully!) I use following little 'quick and dirty'
> patch. It accelerates only simple bitblock moves within the screen,
> but is very useful in xterm-scrolling and opaque-moves.

Disclaimer : I work for XTech !!

XTech is about to release (6th July) an X server based on X11R4 but ported
to use the pixrect library (and hence the GX card) where it is efficient
to do so. Some things, such as bitblts and line drawing is considerably
faster, some things are quicker in native X.

Overall, we were disappointed that the GX performance is not very fast. I
would expect that any operation of reasonable size, (i.e.  other than
small rectangles) to be faster on a piece of hardware dedicated to the
task of drawing fast graphics (and costs a large amount of money).  While
the GX is generally faster most the average speedup is not the 20 times
figure that Sun have quoted to me on several occasions.

One major benefit of porting to pixrect is that the server is about 1/2
the size, since it uses the shared pixrect library. This shows up
particularly when running in a Sunview window, since they share the
library.

Richard Nuttall                                richard at xtech.uucp
XTech, Cambridge, England                      ukc!acorn!unipalm!xtech!richard
Tel: +44 954 211862                            richard at unipalm.uucp