hardware requirements

[Palmer Davis]

In article <1990Dec3.162251.19808 at oct1.UUCP> mason at oct1.UUCP (David Mason) writes:
>
>Are graphics co-processor cards avaliable for ISC 2.2 X on a '386? 
>Any particular types recommended?
>

There are a lot of 340x0 boards out there... it depends how much you want
to spend and how much performance you want.  If you want something at the
very high end (8-plane 1280x1024 with hardware panning, ~40000 xstones in
native mode) Artist Graphics and a number of other companies make 34020 
boards; if you want to spend less, there are a ton of 34010 boards on the 
market.  Several trade journals have run comparisons of various options 
recently; TI also publishes a list of 340x0-based products.

As for OS support, again, it depends on how much performance you want.
There's a company called Pittsburgh Powercomputing that has an X11R4 server
that runs on a number of boards in native 34020 (and -10) mode that works
transparently with clients from both Interactive and SCO.  It should be
available Real Soon Now.  ISC also tries to make sure drivers are available
for a variety of boards; these generally rely on TIGA, DGIS, or some other
type of emulation on 34010 systems and get about half the performance from
the same hardware.  Check with ISC or the board manufacturer in question.

[Disclaimer: I used to work for PPc; take the above with a grain of salt.]

-- PTD --

BTW: Another big win from using a coprocessor board is that you *aren't*
writing to the console video memory, which is hideously slow.  And you
aren't spending lots of 386 cycles on your server (SCO has Xsight default
to running at nice -40!).  So your clients should run a lot faster as well.
--
Palmer T. Davis                 |  davisp at scl.cwru.edu  -OR-  ptd2 at po.cwru.edu
Case Western Reserve University | {att,sun,decvax,uunet}!cwjcc!skybridge!davisp
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Wake up and smell the cat food in your bank account.  |     Life is short.