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From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: VGA Card Recommendation for Zenith Flat Screen
Message-ID: <1990Mar22.020129.5954@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 90 02:01:29 GMT
References: <495523d0.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
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Reply-To: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
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Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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In article <495523d0.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> nelson_p@apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson) writes:
>
>  Now that PC's are entering the workstation-range of MIPS (33MHz
>  386's are 5-7 MIPS, 486's are claiming 10-15 MIPS) it's about
>  time to get workstation-range graphics.  Intelligent graphics
>  processors are the way that workstations do it, and its the way PC's 
>  should (and eventually will) do it too.   It's not a question of
>  "if" but "when".  How many more universally-supported low-end
>  (CGA/EGA/VGA) standards or poorly-supported high-end standards
>  will we have to endure before we get a universally supported 
>  high-end standard?
>
BUT .... it is vitally important that the frame buffer be accessible to
the main CPU. Otherwise there is going to be some fairly large
set of things that the programmer wants to do that happens to be
SLOW as molasses when done using whatever primitives the graphics
processor supports. Try blits from memory to screen on a Silicon
Graphics Iris IV, for example. 

A lot of the so-called high end graphics out there are really good
only for very special purposes. Many, for example, do not have
or, and, xor, etc drawing modes, or transparent colors. The EGA
has all these. It is really a very powerful design. (Of course, 
you could have a coprocessor drive the same hardware...)

Doug McDonald