[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[der Mouse]

>>> My graphics needs are (IMO) very minimal.  I was 24bpp or 32bpp
>>> color and -very- fast 2D.
>> That's hardly *my*, at least, idea of "minimal".  Minimal to me
>> would be monochrome or at most 8bpp colour, and not "-very- fast"
>> anything.
> Next to the gamer weenies[0] that need over 100 frames per second of
> hundreds of thousands of textured polygons rasterized onto a
> 1600x1200 display, my desires are positively spartan.

Well, sure, but that's like saying that next to a two-year-old, most
North Americans are fluent in English.

> I realize that I could easily get by with a very fast black-and-white
> framebuffer, but I see no need to do that when the technology exists
> for me to be able to write software and do web-page editing (along
> with the associated graphics work) on the same piece of display
> hardware.

The technology exists, but for reasons I do not understand, those who
make it refuse to release documentation, so good speed is available
only to those running canned software, like those games.

> I feel I have reasonable demands.  If 14 year-old kids can have
> whatever games they're playing running at a framerate above what
> their LCDs will display, I don't want to be able to perceive screen
> repaints when a window's contents become invalidated.

And I don't want to have to work for a living, too.

What you need is an X server (or moral equivalent) with the kind of
budget behind it that those games have.  Some vendors sell such things.

> Blitting and region-manipulation should be -simple- next to what goes
> on in rendering Doom 3 or World of Warcraft.

They are.  But the video card makers don't want anyone but the games
and their ilk to use the full power of their hardware - or, at least, I
can't see any other reason for their refusal to document their
interfaces.

A cg6 is actually pretty good; it apparently is supposed to do things
like blits fast enough that the bus to the CPU is the limiting factor.
(I've never measured it, but an article by the designers said so.)
Certainly in my experience they've been about as snappy as anything
gets on an SBus SPARC.  Of course, it doesn't satisfy your depth
demands.  A cg14 does, but is insufficiently documented.

Grrr.

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