*BSD News Article 7960


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!hp9000.csc.cuhk.hk!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!hasty
From: hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr)
Subject: Re: What is the best VGA card for 386BSD???
Message-ID: <1992Nov19.093138.14545@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
References: <colin.722054325@marsh> <RICH.92Nov18133928@omicron.Rice.edu>
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 09:31:38 GMT
Lines: 84

In article <RICH.92Nov18133928@omicron.Rice.edu> Rich@rice.edu writes:
>In article <colin.722054325@marsh> colin@cs.curtin.edu.au (Colin Manning) writes:
>   Hi,
>	   My TVGA card neads replacing, and as I plan an running 386BSD most of
>   the time (with X) I was wondering which is the best card I could replace it 
>   with.
>
>	   What is "the best" card, and what is "the best value for money" card?
>   Unfortunatly I don't have an unlimited money supply, and worst of all it will
>   be my money that I will be spending :-)
>
>The best may be the Actix S3 based card Amancio has mentioned.  The S3
>port is new and other than Actix I haven't heard anyone mention
>various cards work.  Diamond doesn't of course.
>
XS3 has been known to work with many S3 based cards including an
S3 local bus card. I have tested XS3 with Orchid's Farenheit 1280
and Actix's GraphicEngine. XS3 will not work with programmable
clock synthetizers such as found with in the Diamond Stealth.


So far only one clone card has been reported that it didn't
work with XS3 and probably the reason is because it used
a programmable clock synthetizer.

S3 chipsets  come  basically in three flavors:
(1) 911 slowest chipset
(2) 924
(3) 801 fastest chipset 

To put things in perspective, Jon Tomb's Actix 911 clocked in
at 38k xstones and his new F1280 clocked in at 48k xstones.

Orchid has an F1280 model with sells for $198 or less.

Overall performance of the 801 is about %50 faster than a 924.
I am putting the finall touches for the 801 server and  it should be
ready in a day or so.

The 801 should be cheaper than a 911 or 924. 

So far it is not clear that a local bus S3 card is faster than
an ISA S3 card.

Here are my xbench results so far for my S3 801 server:

TOTAL     81455 lineStones
TOTAL     59263 fillStones
TOTAL expected     50898 blitStones
TOTAL   2018667 arcStones
TOTAL     90625 textStones
TOTAL     97647 complexStones
TOTAL expected     74952 xStones

I didn't run all the tests due to not having a large swap space.

When I am done I expect to be 3 times faster than a sun
workstation IPC without a GX. The IPC's clock in at 24k xstones.



I have tested my server under xview, gwm and twm, and I have not
seen any problems. Additionally, XS3 is known to work with Motif.

We fixed ALL reported problems with XS3.
One last note, XS3-0.2a passed all x11perf tests without crashing 
and is about %20 faster on overall performance than XS3-0.1.

Hope this helps,
Amancio Hasty

>I use an ET4000 card since that is what is officially supported by
>XFree86 currently.  In the ET4000 cards, the best value for you money
>is problably an off brand with 1Mb memory.  Compu-Tek Int'l at
>214-994-0190 has a Tseng ET4000 with 1MB for $95.  Rich
>
>   Colin.
>   --
>   Colin [colin@cs.curtin.edu.au]
>
>   "Knowledge is not knowing all the answers, but knowing where to find them."
>								     -anon.