[geeks] Re: [rescue] An interesting problem

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 11:11:00PM -0600, Micah R Ledbetter wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 23:10:53 -0500
> Phil Stracchino <alaric at caerllewys.net> wrote:
> 
> >The good news: I can upgrade to Summit Platinum DX, which will let me
> >unmap or remap anything I want, fully support the hardware OpenGL on my
> >Matrox G450, and support the G450's dual-head capability, for $45.
> >(Which is a 50% discount.)
> 
> I've always wondered about those for-pay X servers. Why do you use yours? Would you recommend it to others?

I used to work for Xi Graphics, so I am biased.  

My opinion is that XF86 has gotten a lot better, and the business case
for buying a commercial X server is perhaps not as strong in technical
terms.  If I had a commercial client and they used X all the time,
then it would be a wise choice in terms of not having to mess with it,
and the reassurance of knowing it was supported.

***BUT*** if Xi supports it, they support it at ALL color depths and
ALL resolutions, and the X server will PASS the entire X server test
suite.  This is not necessarily the case with the Xfree server.

AND, it is VERY FAST.  

I remember back in the early PII days (like PII-233) and early AGP
Matrox adapters like the Millennium II - 2D X performance as measured
by Xmark beat out the HP Visualize and Sun's current offering
(whatever that was, I think early Creator).  

I forget what benchmark we ran on the Linux machines vs. Windows NT
drivers, but we even beat them on that, using the same
hardware... apparently the Matrox Windows drivers were not that well
optimized.

I have not looked at their 3D OpenGL drivers recently, but I remember
that even in the first iteration of the code it was kicking the heck
out of Mesa just on software rendering vs. software rendering.  After
several years of development I am sure the hardware-assisted OpenGL is
pretty good.

YMMV,etc.

--Patrick