Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!ico!scottw
From: scottw@ico.isc.com (Scott Wiesner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: Simple X windows benchmark
Message-ID: <1990Jul31.152750.5711@ico.isc.com>
Date: 31 Jul 90 15:27:50 GMT
References: <1990Jul30.235929.29962@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corporation, Boulder, CO
Lines: 17

> The X11R3 does a lot of floating point arithmetic, so the 287 makes a lot
> of difference.  I gather that the X11R4 sample server has been rewritten
> to do as much as possible as integer.  It would be interesting to see some
> relative figures on the R4 server.

This is a common misconception that I wish would die.  Arcs and wide lines
in X11R3 use a lot of floating point.  There's no floating point in text
or CopyArea, so that's not affecting the speed of this scrolling test.  
The bottleneck here is mainly the Hercules board.  Also, the comparison
given was between a version of ISC's X that's over a year old and SCO's
X, which is newer.  Newer releases of ISC's X are somewhat faster.  The
newest (1.2) release integrates the X11R4 arc and wide line code to 
speed up those operations substantially.

Scott Wiesner
Interactive Systems
X Development Group