*BSD News Article 11222


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From: mhiroshi@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp (H. Murakami)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Ree: What kinds of G card are there?
Message-ID: <4102@tansei1.tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
Date: 15 Feb 93 16:01:07 GMT
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|From: hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr)
|Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
|Subject: Re: What kinds of G card are there?
|Message-ID: <1993Feb10.202532.12009@netcom.com>
|
|So lets assume that you your looking for card for an Xserver 
|and will give a broad overview.
|
|The cards can be partioned into two spaces:
|    1. non-accelerated graphics cards 
|	such as the et4000 and others
|   2. accelerated graphic cards such S3 801 cards or 
|       ATI Ultra(mach 8 or mach32 chipsets)
|XS3 is a server for S3 chipsets found in the Actix GraphicEngine32
|or Orchid f1280 ta.
|
|With XS3 like technology we are bringing workstation like performace
|in the X windows environment directly competing against
|sun workstations ipx or IRIS indigo, decstation 3000...
|The performance improvement over an et4000 card is 
|almost an order of magnitute higher. The et4000 is perhaps
|the best chipset for non-accelerated graphics chipsets.

Please give me some information.

We are now planning to buy a machine with VL-local bus DX2/66 ISA machine.
We are thinking 1024x768 or 1280x1024 dots colored CRT display.

1)
	  Is the X-server for the S3 chip MUCH faster than the
	X-server for the chips like ET4000? How faster?
	  If I read from the article quoted above, the XS3 is about 
	10 times faster than X386. Is this real now? 
	Is there no pain for the XS3 compared from X386 for ET4000s?
	(No pain no gain?)

2)
	  Does the X-server for S3 chips use the advantages
	of the S3 chip's instruction over the ET4000 ?
	  I once read that S3 like accelerated cards are only
	effective for the MS-Windows since the card is designed
	to performe the primitive operations used in MS-Windows
	and the X386-server did not or couldn't use the functionality
	of the S3 chips.
3)
	  For the VL-local bus or EISA-bus, which is 32bits wide, 
	does the X-server really use that 32-bits width of the bus ?
	(Or it still uses only 16bit width transfer?)
4)
	  I read new ET4000/W32 is quite fast or faster than S3's.
	Is the X-server for the ordinal ET4000 good for ET4000/W32 also?
	Or the X-server for the ordinal ET4000 cannot use the advantages
	of ET4000/W32 over original ET4000?
5)
	  What is the fastest X-server with the combination with
	the G-card on the VL-bus (ISA) ?

I now using ordinal ET4000(1MB) card on standard ISA bus 486DX/33MHz machine.
I feel the response is a magnitude inferior than the workstations, especially 
when the large fonts are used. 
(But this may be by the CPU-Memory bottleneck and not the CPU-Gcard.)...

Thank you in advance.

	Hiroshi Murakami
	mhiroshi@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
	There is no penalty for speeding by the computers.