Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!husc6!rice!sun-spots-request
From: ray@dsiramd.dsir.govt.nz (Ray Brownrigg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Colour vs monochrome performance
Keywords: Hardware
Message-ID: <571@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 26 Jul 89 20:07:20 GMT
Sender: root@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
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X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 86, message 10 of 18

1) Does anyone have any measurements of the relative performance of colour
vs. monochrome SPARCstations? I have some data which imply that on a
colour 3/60, performance improves by a few percent (as much as 8% for the
whetstone benchmark) when not running in the suntools environment. This
was running *non-graphics* applications (specifically the C and Fortran
compilers, and various CPU benchmarks). Thus one might expect to get some
of this performance improvement for a monochrome workstation when compared
with a colour one. More importantly, of course is the performance of
graphics applications. I have heard of someone who selects monochrome
operation to obtain noticeably better performance of a graphics
application (S-PLUS dynamic graphics on a 3/60). Anyone have any data?

2) Related to this, I presume that the GX graphics accelerator is designed
to enhance colour graphics, and so is inappropriate to consider for a
monochrome workstation. Anybody care to elucidate?

Ray Brownrigg			domain: ray@dsiramd.dsir.govt.nz
Applied Maths Div, DSIR		ACSnet:	ray@dsiramd.nz[@munnari]
PO Box 1335			System:	OLIVETTI/AT&T 3B2/400B+, System V R3.0
Wellington, New Zealand			"unx -rules -OK"