Re: Linux on the desktop viewed as from Joe Winuser

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Daniel C. von Asmuth wrote:

> Thus quoth Alex Butcher on Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 06:19:26PM +0000:
> > On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Daniel C. von Asmuth wrote:
> > > Linux is fast, but the X Window System makes graphical applications very
> > > slow.
> > 
> > Blame driver performance (which usually comes down to insufficient
> > programming information for the video chipsets), blame poor porting, but X
> > is most certainly not the problem. Otherwise, well-ported games running with
> > nVidia's drivers would not perform within a percentage-point or two of their
> > Windows equivalents on the same hardware.
> > 
> > Although X provides for network transparency, there are plenty of
> > short-circuits that it and applications can use for best performance if the
> > applications are running on the same host as the X server.
> 
> Sorry, but I blame X, not some driver, not Linux. (see the Unix Haters Handbook)
> Compare this to DOS where games manipulate the video hardware directly.

The UHH is years out of date.

Modern X servers (e.g. XFree86) allow similarly low-level access to local
video hardware using the DRI extension
<http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/DRI>.

See these benchmarks to prove my original point that it's the driver
performance and quality of porting that makes the diffence:
<http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video_winvslin/>

Note that Quake 3/nVidia/Linux/XFree86 OUTPERFORMS Windows; well-written
drivers and a high-quality port allow that.

> Kind regards,
> Daniel von Asmuth

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>