Re: [9fans] ctrl radeon: not working for ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility?

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> I was curious to see how performance differs from vesa.

me, too.  radeon performance is not good with vesa.

> meanwhile, am I right if I think that the whole graphics math is done
> on cpu (I mean - not on gpu), so the faster the cpu the better vesa
> (and any) driver performance?

cpu speed seems to have little to do with it.  the main slowdown
is reading from the hardware framebuffer, which plan 9 does a lot.
on many modern cards there is no phsical framebuffer.  it's
constructed by firmware (perhaps running in smm mode on the
cpu) on-the-fly.

> Proprietary drivers use gpu and many
> things built in the graphics controller and so they unload the cpu.
> Plan 9 drivers are there to initialize and set up the device, scroll
> and fill and this is, basically all, right? If this is so, the brute
> force through powerful cpu + vesa is easiest solution, the way to go.

i think it's mainly a question of getting the best graphics
performance.  but these days the 2d accelleration (especially
for radeon) is fairly poor.  i'd love to have my nvidia mx400
back with a pcie interface.

- erik