Re: Video "ringing" with PBXGA but not Mach64 or Elsa Gloria

From: Hoff Hoffman (hoff_at_hp.nospam)
Date: 10/23/03 

Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 03:50:52 GMT

In article <3F974000.3000305@Flying-Disk.com>, Alan Frisbie <Usenet01REMOVE@Flying-Disk.com> writes:
..
:I would like to upgrade to a higher-performance system like a
:DS10 or XP1000...

  As OpenVMS I64 releases continue to roll out, remember that another
  hardware upgrade option that is becoming more readily available to
  OpenVMS users includes new or used members of the HP Integrity series
  systems. (Look at the web prices for various of the Integrity boxes,
  for example.)

:> The PowerStorm 3D10T ELSA GLoria Synergy is probably the newest card
:> that has a shot of working, though I do not know if that would be
:> supported in this configuration.
:
:Supported or not, it has been working nicely all afternoon and
:I am very happy with it.

  The PowerStorm 3D10T is a comparatively slow controller. (Which
  might well suit your AlphaStation 200 box, but I digress. :-) On
  various of the faster AlphaStation series systems, the relatively
  limited performance of the PowerStorm 3D10T can be disconcerting.

  The PowerStorm 3D30 (and PowerStorm 4D20) offer *very* fast 2D,
  and I would almost always choose a PowerStorm 3D30 controller
  over a PowerStorm 3D10T -- and I'd probably also choose it over
  many other 2D graphics controllers, for that matter.

..
:I did determine that the ATI Rage XL will *NOT* work, at least in
:my configuration.

  The drivers for the ATI Radeon 7500 graphics controller are not
  expected to operate within this AlphaStation 200 series or other
  similar-vintage configurations. The microprocessor is too far
  back, and the I/O bus interface requires byte-swizzling.

  The cut-off for new graphic controller support is generally EV6
  and later, though a few and very specific EV56 boxes might also
  be supported. The key here is byte-word addressing within the
  Alpha microprocessor and a non-swizzled I/O space bus interface.
  (If your driver's call into IOC$NODE_FUNCTION returns a zero for
  the swizzle shift count, you're good to go. If the call returns
  non-zero, you can make calls to IOC$READ_IO and IOC$WRITE_IO --
  which handle swizzled and non-swizzled references for you -- or
  you are soon to learn about swizzling... Various of the graphics
  device drivers have substantial knowledge of I/O space and of the
  processor and can and do go directly at the I/O device.) Whoops,
  that's probably _way_ more detail than you cared to know about...

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 --------------------------- pure personal opinion ---------------------------
        Hoff (Stephen) Hoffman OpenVMS Engineering hoff[at]hp.com