Colour vs monochrome performance

[Ray Brownrigg]

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 at dsiramd.dsir.govt.nz
Applied Maths Div, DSIR		ACSnet:	ray at dsiramd.nz[@munnari]
PO Box 1335			System:	OLIVETTI/AT&T 3B2/400B+, System V R3.0
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