[rescue] WTB: Ultra 60/80

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 06 May 2005 @ 22:16 -0500, Lionel Peterson said:

> >Is there no hope of getting a fast PC graphics card working on a PCI
> >based Sun?
> 
> Well, not sure, but my thoughts would be:
> 
> PC card, no - need OpenBoot on the card - think Mac, not PC

I've heard of people with FLASH based cards burning Apple ROMs, but it
seems rare to have flash upgradable PCI cards.

My graphics card (AGP) is flash upgradeable, and so were a couple of my
PCI SCSI cards, but I almost never see that feature on a PCI card.

> Fast card? Well, it would have to be PCI, and there aren't that many
> PCI-based Mac cards to begin with, so it could be tough...

Hmmm... that's about what I thought.  I don't keep up with Sun video,
having been generally disappointed, but check around now and then to
see.

I suppose then you have the driver issue to deal with.

I thought maybe now that PCI Suns had been out awhile, some of the
faster PC cards would have encouraged someone to write drivers.

> Fast is a relative term, there are faster PCI cards that will work,
> but they are rare and expensive (I suspect)... Why not add a dedicated
> 100 Mb/sec Ethernet connection to a fast computer acting as an
> XTerminal?

Two primary reasons: performance even on 100Mbit can be really bad for
some applications.

The other problem is that an increasing amount of X code will not run
remotely, or runs very poorly.  Programs are starting to make more and
more use of local server only features.

A lot of graphics APIs and X itself is moving to the Apple method of
accelerating graphics, by putting OpenGL underneath it all.

Some of this stuff will not work remotely at all.  Even that which does,
often is quite hungry for bandwidth.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see how it all works out.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The grieving lords take ship.  With these
our very souls pass overseas." -- Exile]