From: Marcus Sundberg <mackan@stacken.kth.se>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 23:20:52 +0100

Re: [linux-fbdev] Accel or not accel in kernel! (fwd)

Sengan Baring-Gould wrote:
> 
> Marcus Sundberg wrote:
> 
> > Sengan Baring-Gould wrote:
> > > Sounds good to me: the 3dfx cards that don't support 2d but do support 3d
> >
> > Ehum, please define "support 2d". ;)
> > 3dfx cards have a linear framebuffer and they support lines and area
> > fills, so I wouldn't say they don't support 2d, even though they are
> > not designed for it.
> 
> Hmm... Someone at work was going on about how he had 3 cards in his
> machine -- one for 2d, one for 3d (3dfx) and one for DVD + the Banshee
> is supposed to be all so cool because it's got 3D+2D support. So, I assume
> if it supports 2d, it doesn't do it too well, or there would not be that much
> fuss about it.
> 
> Do you have more details on this?

Well, first of all there's no X-server or win* driver that runs
on glide, so from the regular user's point of view it doesn't
support 2d. And even if there was you wouldn't get any performance
comparable to todays 2s-cards (not even the simpler ones) out of it,
as 3dfx doesn't support any kinds of blits. (Which is quite
understandable as it's designed with only 3D in mind.)

However, the ability to directly access the framebuffer, and the
fact that it has most excelent performance when it comes to lines
and triangles (and out of two triangles you make a rectangle), makes
glide quite nice to implement a LibGGI target on.

The glide target is infact one of the fastest LibGGI targets there
is, except when it comes to CopyBox, where an accelerated kgicon
driver will outperform it by far.

So in short - 3dfx supports 2d, as you can run all LibGGI apps on
it with the glide target, but it's quite ill-suited to run a windowing
system on.

//Marcus
-- 
-------------------------------+------------------------------------
        Marcus Sundberg        | http://www.stacken.kth.se/~mackan
 Royal Institute of Technology |       Phone: +46 707 295404
       Stockholm, Sweden       |   E-Mail: mackan@stacken.kth.se