[SunRescue] What should I look for?

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Paolo Di Francesco wrote:

> I cannot buy an "old" ATI card (Rage IIc). Noone sells it anymore. Now 
> everyone has the TNT2 based card, or VoodooIII card, but no old ATI 
> cards.

Check mail-order stores.  It's not that old of a card, and they still make
them.

> Yes, but they cost and people does not want to pay for it... 8(

This is true, and the high-end 3D market is not Sun's main graphics focus.
The CAD market probably is a better bet for them.

> Good news for me! But are you using commercial compilers? Have you using 
> gcc? I have an AXi but I don't know how much fast is compared to the 
> intel world. Any performance test?

Mostly raw SPARC V9 assembly with heavy use of VIS.  gcc is wonderfully
portable but on an Ultra it's quite poor at generating tight code (makes
sense as even the egcs SPARC optimizer isn't improved much over the
original gcc 2 optimizer).  Sun's SPARCompilers do a much better job
(especially on fp-intensive code) but I can still squeeze out an extra 30%
by coding the critical parts in assembly.

It all depends on which CPU you're using.  The 270MHz/256k CPU is fairly
poor due to small cache size, but the 333MHz and up with 2mb cache really
scream.  If you're doing memory-intensive fp work it's hard to beat an
Ultra for the price.

-James