[rescue] cgsix question

[Kevin]

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Plethora of information.

Thanks,
/KRM

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002 13:39:21 -0500
Joshua D Boyd <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu> wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 01, 2002 at 12:21:50AM -0500, Kevin
> wrote:
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> > 
> > I guess "acceptable" is a bit ambiguous, sorry. 
> > What i mean to ask is, has anyone here used it and
> > was pleased with it for their purposes, whatever
> > those may have been.
> > 
> > Is it just a raster shader or does it do T&L as
> > well? Any geometry engine?  Does it do OpenGL or
> > was there a competing standard for Suns at the
> > time?
> 
> There are OpenGL drivers available separately.  I've
> seen references to them in print, and heard people
> mention them, but never actually seen them.
> 
> It also supports PHIGS, PEX, and XGL (these three are
> built into Solaris I believe).  
> 
> It does do hardware lighting.  And it does do
> hardware geometry transformation, and it does do
> hardware NURBS (via a hardware tessolator).  It does
> not do texturing.  T&L is a PC word, since in the
> workstation world, there aren't very many raster only
> systems (I think the O2 is one of the few), but they
> are lots of non-texturing systems.
> 
> The ZX has a number of interesting features.  First,
> it's overlay plane allows both 24bit and 8bit
> graphics simultaneously, so you can run the GIMP in
> 24bit, but Mozilla in only 8 bit, and doom in 8 bit,
> and yet have no color flashing from conflicting
> palletes.  Well, in theory you can do that.  I'm not
> sure how you force a program to not auto-detect that
> the Xserver is 24bit capable so that it runs in 8bit
> mode.
> 
> It seems to be more flexible with regard to the
> resolutions is supports than most Sun cards.  I saw
> one running at NTSC resolution hooked up to some NTSC
> displays (through an array of passthroughs and Ys, it
> was hooked up to a video printer, two video monitors,
> and a NTSC headmounted display).  It supports stereo,
> but not in a way that would work without head mounted
> display.
> 
> Also, the overlay plane is rather slow, but running
> programs in 8bit mode helps.  I suspect that this is
> exasperated by software not using some of the built
> in features for supporting fast scrolling, but I
> don't know for sure.
> 
> Some particularly interesting things is that it
> accelerates XIL, so if you happen to be doing any
> imaging work, this would make it faster (but probably
> not as fast as the average Mac).  I also get the
> impression that it will accelerate DisplayPostscript
> rendering.
> 
> You should be able to find almost all the information
> you need in a document titled "SPARCstation 10ZX and
> SPARCstation ZX Graphics Technology White Paper -
> July 1993".  It is available somewhere on the web. 
> Try citeseer.
> 
> -- 
> Joshua D. Boyd
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list -
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
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