[SunRescue] Silly Question.

[tom]

<snip>
>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.

Something I haven't looked into so far, but sounds like it may well be worth 
it.

<snip>
>>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.

Aha! Now that is *very* handy to know. Time to start playing with clock 
speeds, I think :-)

<snip>
>> *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.

Yeah, I know, but I can dream, can't I :-)

Still, can't complain. For a sysadmin to have a Creator 3D in his desktop 
machine isn't so bad, and it does make a speed difference to CDE. Plus 24-bit 
colour at some obscene resolutions (even if my Indy does that as well :-)

I'd like to see Sun bring out some workstations with the usual Sun 
reliability, running Solaris, but with the slick user interface and graphical 
capabilities of IRIX and the SGI boxen.

Slightly off topic, but has anyone tried Quake 2 on an Indigo2 Max or High 
Impact? How much of a difference does the hardware texture mapping make?

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.