[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 01:38:03PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

> >Every U60 I sat down at had relatively low end graphics and it was too
> >slow.  OpenGL was abysmal.
> 
>   Indeed.  I guess it's a good thing they're not game machines or 
> animation workstations.  OpenGL is a niche, not a hard-and-fast 
> requirement for any desktop machine.
> 
>   If you want good OpenGL performance, you need to look into SGI.  Suns 
> aren't built for it, and PCs are toys for "kiddiez".

Bah.

Sun needs to get fast OpenGL into more of the machines.  OpenGL is a
great way to do many non gaming, non animation tasks.

It is, for instance, great for 2D line drawings programs (say, PCB
design).  It is great for paint programs.  It is even good for terminal
programs.  It is good for pretty much every graphics heavy task (as
opposed to those tasks that use a bajillion CPU cycles, then print a
single line of results, or programs that use disk and network but
display nothing).

And what does Sun do?  They introduce a new low end graphics card that
is both competent hardware for 2D graphics and 3D graphics, and they
refuse to supply drivers to do anything more than accelerated X11, and
then go pitch it as a card for finance and EDA (plus whatever the heck
education and government mean).  And they have the neard to charge $300
for the sucker.

After that "low end" card, then next step up is $1200 for another PCI
card (66mhz, 64bit, which is generally fine, but doesn't really hold up
against modern AGP for most things), which quite possible isn't any
better for 3D than a radeon 7000 is.

I wonder what the chances of getting XFree working on Solaris/Sparc (it
works on linux/sparc and solaris/x86...) is, and what one would loose by
doing that.  Of course, Solaris/SPARC doesn't support the DRI system
that XFree uses...

Stupid pricks.
 
>   They are nearly always faster clock for clock.  However, I wasn't 
> aware that you were talking exclusively about OpenGL graphics 
> performance.  I'm sorry if that was my mistake.  Sun workstations 
> definitely aren't very strong there...as that's not what they're 
> designed to do.

Well they bloody well need to be better about OpenGL.  OpenGL isn't just
animation and games anymore (well, it never was just that, but it's only
been relatively recently that people have begun catching on).

How much would it really cost them to enable OpenGL on the radeon 7000s?