From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 1995 05:55:02 -0400
From: forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk
Subject: Does Plan 9 use graphics hardware
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2418b02e-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950913095502.DdguWninLOBbbn8DK_ECXPraUhnEVQBF7p_HGspq7VE@z>

>>	Does Plan 9 use hardware graphics accelerators?  If not, does the design
>>	allow efficient use of graphics accelerator hardware or does it require
>>	a dumb frame buffer?

and they rarely come dumber than the PC design... what an architecture.

/sys/src/9/indigo3k/screen.[ch] shows one way to make some use of
an accelerator behind the /dev/bitblt interface.  i adapted it on the old
release to produce a version of devvga.c that would use some of the S3
accelerator functions.  it still had some mistakes in it when i put it
aside along with the S3 (it was old enough to have a proprietary local bus).
the DX4/100 and ET4000/W32 are fast enough for me now that i haven't
bothered to look at it again.  on the PC, there's possibly more scope
for improvement for everything by changing the way it handles the
stupid byte ordering problem (PC vs. display).

i installed a linux system yesterday and although i'm prepared to
believe that X11's ET4000/W32p driver gains a lot by using the accelerator
features, Plan 9 feels snappier: not because it draws a new window
to the screen faster, but because the window (and its contents) start
so much faster.