[SunRescue] Silly Question.

[tom]

>Hey, I know this really isn't relevant, but has anyone ever tried to
>play games on an Ultra (pci) with the PCi card?  I think it'd be really
>funny to see something like that.

Yes :-)

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.

My desktop is an Ultra AXi - 333mhz, 2mb cache, 384mb RAM, and a Creator 3D. 
The SunPCi card is an early one - 300mhz AMD chip, 64mb RAM, and I think 
something desperately poor like 256k or 512k cache.

Anyway, Quake was OK, Quake 2 was adequate, Unreal was verging on unplayable. 
Carmaggedon 2 was alright in low-res mode.

Nothing will work at a decent, playable speed using anything higher than 
320x240 mode. The graphics chipset in the SunPCi just isn't up to it.

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.

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>

*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!

Cheers,
TOM

--
Tom Kranz - tom at nipltd.com
Systems Administrator, New Information Paradigms Ltd.
My opinions are my own, not NIP's, and not my cat's.