Hi. I have been following XFree86 since a long time,
so i thought i'd just give a few pennies of mine.. :)
> >
> > 1. Framebuffered X, can be equal to/faster than
> > XF86_SVGA for some well
> > supported graphics card?
The Frame Buffer is NOT accelerated in most cases,
except for a few ATI, and MATROX cards. It is a simple
solution for unsupported cards, which happen to be
having a VESA 2.0 BIOS. AFAIK, it DOES NOT offer the
same speed offered by the other accelerated servers,
or the generic XF86_SVGA server, if u're card is one
of the cards which is supported. XFree86 4.0 however
has excellent speed improvements as DRI is used, which
allows driver writers to implement acceleration into
the driver itself, which is FASTER than the XAA used
by the XF86_SVGA server, on all cards. I suggest using
a server that supports u're card directly instead of
running it on fbcon, as there is a considerable speed
defect in the fbcon, as it is unaccelerated.
> >
> > 2. What else positive experiences you have had.
The only +ve experience with the fb, is the startup
boot logo! of course GGI's kgicon is MUCH faster than
the kernel fb.
> > 3. Can we totally do away with the graphics card?
NO! All that the framebuffer offers is a linear
mapping to the Video RAM of the gfx card, which is one
of the salient features offered by VESA 2.0. So,
instead of using the card instructions to draw, we
just make a pointer to the buffer and start writing
directly. In short, there is absolutely NO direct
communication with the gfx card. It displays whatever
we write to it. This prevents us from using the
acceleration features that the card may provide - the
reason for it being slow.
U DO need a gfx card. There IS virtual framebuffer
support, which just allocates memory and treates it as
a framebuffer. If u have someway of using that info,
maybe send it over the network, for some kind of
remote rendering, then maybe u can do away with the
gfx card. But if u want to see something - u need a
gfx card. :)
Nikhil.
ILUG-HYD.
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