Paul Gress writes in comp.unix.solaris:
|directly connected to the graphics. I also believe Sun tried to correct
|this with VIS (EOL'd) and XIL (endangered), and now with OpenGL and

VIS is built in to every UltraSPARC processor and is definitely not
EOL'ed. I think you've confused your acronyms there.

--
__________________________________________________ ______________________
Alan Coopersmith alanc@alum.calberkeley.org
http://www.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU/~alanc/ aka: Alan.Coopersmith@Sun.COM
Working for, but definitely not speaking for, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Paul Curren writes in comp.unix.solaris:
|Does this make sense? Or can anyone offer me the real reason. And more
|importantly, does anyone know how to improve matters? 2D display drivers
|for Xsun? (I have the OpenGL drivers already), an improved X Server?

There is no other X server you can use - the XVR-500 DDX module (what
you call a "2D display driver") is only available for Xsun. It's that
module which has the greatest effect on the speed at which your card
does rendering. You may want to make sure you have the latest patches
installed for that card to see if there are any changes to the DDX
module that may help.

--
__________________________________________________ ______________________
Alan Coopersmith alanc@alum.calberkeley.org
http://www.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU/~alanc/ aka: Alan.Coopersmith@Sun.COM
Working for, but definitely not speaking for, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Paul Curren wrote:
> Hi there, i'm looking for some input on behaviour i'm seeing on my Sun
> Blade 150 workstation.
>
> Despite my workstation having a XVR-500 3D Graphics card which I believe
> to be a decent card, 2D graphics performance seems very very poor. For
> instance, using KDE 3.1, if I resize any window (with "show contents"
> enabled) it is very very slow to keep up. Likewise, menus and other such
> display artifacts can be very slow to draw.
>
> The performance is much poorer than even my Linux PC machine of 6 years
> ago - around about the advent of 2D Graphics accelerators :-)
>
> I have no real idea of the problem but i'm guessing that perhaps the Sun
> XServer (XSun) does not make use of any of the hardware available on the
> graphics card and is instead doing most of the 2D graphics in software.
>
> Does this make sense? Or can anyone offer me the real reason. And more
> importantly, does anyone know how to improve matters? 2D display drivers
> for Xsun? (I have the OpenGL drivers already), an improved X Server?

I have played quiet a bit with KDE3 and 3.1 and 3.11 on Solaris
and built it from sources about 4 times.

The problems with building KDE for solaris is that there is no
automatic way or compile time option to force KDE to use
the SUN Medialib or the VIS instruction set.
As these acceleration facilities does not exist on LINUX
KDE is not developed for them


Last time I built KDE on Solaris I used:

gcc -03 -mcpu ultrasparc -mtune ultrasparc -Wa,xarch=v8plusa

as compile options. This seemed to make things slighly more
usable.

To Build KDE with the Native SUN studio7 compiler you need to be
a pretty good C-programmer ( better than me :-) ) as the KDE
code is GNUC specific in places.

There are some people who you can find at this URL:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-solaris&r=1&w=2

that are producing KDE with the Native Sun compiler.

The problem with performance in KDE is therefore the fact
that KDE DOES NOT make use of the available graphic acceleration
facilities.

If you have enough RAM in your machine ( I have 1280 MB in my blade 100 )
you will
find that SUN GNOME2 is much faster doing graphics precisely because
it IS using the Medialib and VIS.

--
================================================== ======
Lars Tunkrans
smtp: lars dot tunkrans at bredband dot net
--------------------------------------------------------

Hi All, and thanks for the comments. I'm not going to try and build KDE
using the workshop compiler - I need to get on with some real work :-)

I'll give the Sun distribution of Gnome a shot, but I don't hold out
much hope for improved 2D graphics performance. I say this because even
using CDE, graphics performance is 1998-ish. I'll also have a check that
i'm patched up to the most recent level though.

Thanks again.

Paul C


Lars Tunkrans wrote:

> I have played quiet a bit with KDE3 and 3.1 and 3.11 on Solaris
> and built it from sources about 4 times.
>
> The problems with building KDE for solaris is that there is no
> automatic way or compile time option to force KDE to use
> the SUN Medialib or the VIS instruction set.
> As these acceleration facilities does not exist on LINUX
> KDE is not developed for them
>
>
> Last time I built KDE on Solaris I used:
>
> gcc -03 -mcpu ultrasparc -mtune ultrasparc -Wa,xarch=v8plusa
>
> as compile options. This seemed to make things slighly more
> usable.
>
> To Build KDE with the Native SUN studio7 compiler you need to be
> a pretty good C-programmer ( better than me :-) ) as the KDE
> code is GNUC specific in places.
>
> There are some people who you can find at this URL:
>
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-solaris&r=1&w=2
>
> that are producing KDE with the Native Sun compiler.
>
> The problem with performance in KDE is therefore the fact
> that KDE DOES NOT make use of the available graphic acceleration
> facilities.
>
> If you have enough RAM in your machine ( I have 1280 MB in my blade
> 100 )
> you will
> find that SUN GNOME2 is much faster doing graphics precisely because
> it IS using the Medialib and VIS.
>