AcceleratedX and the Matrox Millenium (was Re: Side question)
[wrt the Matrox Millenium]
> R> This card works fine with linux, but you have to buy a commercial X
> R> server as the XFree86 servers don't support it. I got mine from
> R> XInside, and it works fine.
>
> Sorry to follow myself up, but Bruce's post made me rememeber that the
> XInside server won't work with Debian "out of the box", you have to
> get libtermcap.so.2 and stick it somewhere ld.so can find it.
OK. However, notice that the XInside server (AcceleratedX) is
incredibly memory-hungry: it consumes approximately 3 times as much
RAM as a similarly configured XFree server. It is faster, no doubt
about that, but consider this:
Start X (1280x1024, 16bpp), run olvwm, a couple of xterms, an Emacs
and Netscape, edit a few files, browse a little.
AcceleratedX will happily start at around 12M and proceed to take up
around 20-24M of RAM, while XFree, with the same treatment will stay
at approximately 8-9M.
This led me to replace a Matrox Millenium with an XFree-supported card
(in this case, a Diamond Stealth64 (S3 968)). X is slower (about half
the speed of AcceleratedX on the Matrox, as measured by xbench), but
the system is overall much better. It used to be the case that a
machine with 32M would constantly be swapping because of the X
server.
After the swap, the system feels much better. I tried the same thing
on a notebook and got similar results (AcceleratedX would be 4x faster
gain and take up 3x more memory). Note that for the portable, the
XFree server used was XF86_SVGA while in the desktop system it's
obviously XF86_S3.
My conclusion: if you want to stick with the Matrox and AcceleratedX,
you'll need at least 48 or 64M. (for 1280x1024, 16bpp).
Salvador
Reply to: