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From: rich@Rice.edu (Richard Murphey)
Subject: Re: Supported video adapters
In-Reply-To: jeffc@netcom.com's message of Sat, 20 Feb 1993 04:13:38 GMT
Message-ID: <RICH.93Feb20221203@omicron.Rice.edu>
Sender: news@rice.edu (News)
Reply-To: Rich@Rice.edu
Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice
University
References: <1993Feb20.041338.3173@netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 04:12:03 GMT
Lines: 88
In article <1993Feb20.041338.3173@netcom.com> jeffc@netcom.com (Jeff Cohen) writes:
Which video adapters are supported by X-windows for 386BSD? In
particular, are any S3-based cards supported?
Here's a somewhat out of date cost/performance analysis of graphics
adapters. The bechmarks for the S3 based cards a going up as software
and hardware development proceed, but the conclusions are the same.
Please note that the S3 cards are *not* supported by XFree86 yet.
Rich
Which graphics card supported by XFree86 or XS3 should I get for
the highest performance per dollar value?
For under $100, the Tseng ET4000 is reasonable. For $200 or so an
Actix Graphics Engine gives six times the performance of the ET4000.
XFree86 supports et4000, et3000, pvga1, gvga, ati and tvga8900
chipsets while XS3 supports only the S3 chipset. The rankings by
xstones are:
Model Chip Xstones Price Ratio
GraphicEngine VLBus S3 805 88K $220 2.5 $/k
GraphicEngine 32b S3 801 64.1K $210 3.3 $/k
F1280 (most recent) S3 924 48.6k $210 4.3 $/k
GraphicEngine 70 S3 911 37.4K ? ? $/k
F1280 (first model) S3 911 24.6k $170 6.9 $/k
ATI VGA Wondercard XL ATI ? $130 ? $/k
ET4000 32bit VLBus ET4000 19.0k $159 8.4 $/k
ProDesigner II ET4000 11.6k $130 11.2 $/k
Tseng ET4000 11.6k $88 7.6 $/k
Trident 8900C TVGA8900 5.1k $58 11.4 $/k
911, 924 and 928 chips use VRAM while the 801 and 805 use DRAM.
VRAM performance degrates less at high dot clock refresh rate and
screen sizes. Although the 80x performance is higher it may not
necessarily scale as well as the 9xx to large displays.
The following performance ratings are relative to a value of 10000
for a monochrome SUN 3/50 running X11R3 communicating via unix
sockets. A machine with double the performance will therefore get
20000 and a machine with half the performance will get 5000. These
benchmarks were taken on various PC hardware, so the results cannot
be quantitatively consistent. We should not rely on them
quantitatively, but Until we have all the cards available in one
place this is the best we can do.
machine p comm line fill blt text arc cmplx xstone
Sparc2 gx 8 local 244821 44250 50912 435875 7763207 85816 97803
Gr.Eng.32 VLBus 8 local 141256 66431 40214 169812 3637764 132418 88451
Gr.Eng.32b 13MHz bus 8 local 107908 42632 31590 117562 2975512 92352 64061
Gr.Eng.32b 6MHz bus 8 local 102774 45363 27382 113125 2485082 97712 60897
F1280 924 486/33 8 local 111640 30450 21935 103812 2871708 62222 48559
Gr.Eng.70 13MHz bus 8 local 103781 21777 16997 83875 2580416 46797 37496
X11R5 S3 X386 8 local 107087 22917 15007 56375 2522818 44117 34032
Sparc1+ cg3 8 local 121149 13219 10735 134750 2112958 22418 25901
F1280 911 8 local 56746 16390 10463 53625 1425872 34444 24625
ET4000 486/50 VLBus 8 local 123308 13529 5951 138187 1941774 18954 19008
ET4000 486/33 8 socket 88671 9562 3372 97281 1377355 11307 11621
Sun3/50 (R3) 1 socket 10000 10000 10000 10000 10000 10000 10000
Trident 8900C 8 socket 55957 2503 1990 45937 705011 4248 5123
line = solid-line, dashed-line, wide-line and rectangle performance.
fill = solid-, tile- and stipple-rectangle-fill performance.
blt = invrects, screencopy, scroll, and bitmapcopy performance.
arc = arc- and filledarc performance.
p = color/greyscale planes. '1' means monochrome.
Actix GraphicEngine 23b $210 Palo Alto Micro 415-493-8209
Actix GraphicsEngine32+ 2MB $243 CSI 800-733-9798
Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 1Mb+Sierra $210 OS Computer 800-938-6722
ATI VGA Wondercard XL 1Mb $129 Harmony Computer 800-441-1144
Orchid ProDesigner IIs 1Mb+Sierra $130 Dee One Systems 800-831-8808
Tseng ET4000 1Mb $88 OS Computer 800-938-6722
TVGA8900 Trident 8900C 1MB $58 Dee One Systems 800-831-8808
ET4000 32bit VLBus 1Mb $159 PC Importers 800-886-5155
Actix GraphicEngine $? NTD 800-998-1699
Actix GraphicEngine $? Actix Systems 800-927-5557
Actix GraphicEngine $? DPS 800-669-8194
XFree86 does not support any Diamond boards beyond the old
Speedstar+ models. We cannot support their newer boards in the
forseeable future because the interface to their proprietary clock
synthesizers is a 'trade secret' protected by non-disclosure
licensing restrictions. They could threaten legal action even on an
independently developed interface and this has scared many
contributors away. Our sincere advice is to avoid Diamond.