Thanks for the honest appraisals.
Already decided to bite the bullet this morning and get a slightly used
AMD workstation. While I enjoy the challenges, ultimately computers are
a tool for me to perform work. The x86 path offers time to devote to
web mapping ideas instead of wrestling with arcane hardware.
Had Sun hardware since my grad school days, and still have a number of
more recent vintage AMD rack mounts, but with Oracle buying them out,
its time to let it go.
Peter
On 11-09-15 01:20 PM, Matthieu Herrb wrote:
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 12:54:06PM -0700, Peter Sprague wrote:
Everything works fine and within the stated capabilities of the
wildcatfb driver. I understand that the wildcatfb driver is only
unaccelerated 8 bits, but I thought the wsfb driver was supposed to
be able to provide accelerated 24 bit depth. That is what I
attempting to get operating.
wsfb has no acceleration either.
The wsfb driver seems to fail when I force its use with 8 bit - 24
bit.
Yes the reason for which wildcatfb exists is that the frame buffer
layout of ifb(4) is weird and difficult to support in wsfb.
Is there a recommended video card for the Blade 1000 that will give
me the operational performance I need?
Seems like my Blade will become a brick unless I go back to Solaris.
I think there may be some ATI based framebuffers (PGX24, XVR-100,
XVR-300) that are supported in a Blade 1000 and can use the
xf86-video-mach64 or xf86-video-radeon drivers with 24bpp and 2D
acceleration. but I'm not sure, since I don't have access to any of
those framebuffers. Other OpenBSD developpers probably know better.
Honestly if you need graphics performance, give up on sparc64 and get
a cheap x86 based machine (even a 7-8 years old one with a supported
card will outperform any other architecture under X on OpenBSD, and
not only because it's the only architecture that gets attention from
X.Org developpers).
