[SunRescue] Silly Question.

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, tom wrote:

> If you have the Windoze session displayed under X (I'm using CDE as my window 
> mangler here) then you have problems - can't use DirectX or anything. If you 
> display it to an external monitor, dedicated to the SunPCi card, then the 
> drivers change, and you can load up DirectX.

Try loading the new Sun drivers when you get a chance (to support Win98).
They fix many other problems including graphics driver bugs and finally
include a native CDROM driver to read Windows long file names.

> The later model SunPCis have 400 mhz AMDs, which would have a 100mhz memory 
> bus. Looking at the performance of Windoze machines here, I'd say that would 
> make a nice jump in speed - whether enough to play something really demanding 
> like a game in 640x480, I don't know.

>From what I can tell, the SunPCi (at least the first rev) can't use a
100MHz bus.  Bus speeds range from 53MHz to 83MHz, and multipliers range
from 2.5 to 6.  A 500MHz K6-2 (83MHz x 6) looks like it would be the
ultimate high end.

JK1/2/3 controls the bus clock, JP4 controls the multiplier, and JP5 the
core voltage.

> Besides, there's Quake, Quake2, and mods for both ported to Solaris. Very 
> fast, very nice, eminently playable. Plus a copy of Xpilot and BZFlag compiled 
> for Solaris, and you're well away <grin>

Now that the Quake source is out in the open, it would be interesting to
see the Solaris driver code.  The XIL version is surprisingly playable
even on older hardware.

> *sigh* If only Sun took the hint from SGI and had hardware texture mapping in 
> their cards. I mean, the Creator 3D is very nice, but the moment you need 
> *anything* that does texture mapping, the performance drops through the floor.
> 
> Wakeup, Sun, dammit! And don't make the cards prohibitively expensive when you 
> do get round to doing it!

I'm sure they're working on it, and I'm sure they'll be very expensive at
first.  Heck, the Indigo2 High and Max IMPACT boardsets are over 5 years
old and still command several hundreds of dollars.

Any new framebuffer that does texturing won't be designed for the hobbyist
gamer, it will be designed for the high-end CAD/CAM/data visualization
market.  I would expect the Creator to disappear and the Elite3D to be
pushed down in price to where the Creator is, and the new card to be
positioned in the Elite price range.

-James