XWindows ??

[Charles Neil]

In article <11116 at goofy.Apple.COM>, abm at alan.aux.apple.com (Alan Mimms) writes:
> In article <7506 at cica.cica.indiana.edu>, Don.Gilbert at IUBio.Bio.Indiana.Edu (Don Gilbert) writes:
> |> I am close to deciding on a purchase of A/UX
> 
> Good choice.

[words of encouragement deleted]

> (Note that our X Window System product is NOT a
> straight port; very significant enchancements -- especially with regard
> to performance -- are built into the software, and an excellent set of
> manuals above and beyond the normal MIT manual pages is included.)
> 
> Alan Mimms (alan at apple.com, ...!apple!alan)   | My opinions are generally
> A/UX X group                                  | pretty worthless, but
> Apple Computer                                | they *are* my own...

I have to respond to this performance statement.  Here on a MacIIfx with
16 M memory, I have both Apple's commercial MacX for A/UX 2.0 and MIT's 
standard X11R4 (with patches 1-19) distribution compiled under gcc
1.37.91.  In doing large nos. of vector draws on a Tektronix xterm, I
roughly gauged the MIT server to operate twice as fast as the MacX server.
So I ran x11perf on each server in one-bit mode to check it out.
Here are the results of the first few x11perf tests:

                                    Repetitions/sec
Test Name                           MIT     MacX     Factor
---------------------------------   ---     ----     ------
    Dot                             97300   26800    3.6
    1x1 rectangle                   28200   12600    2.2
  10x10 rectangle                   14700   9120     1.6
100x100 rectangle                   1320    1000     1.3
500x500 rectangle                   108     36       3.0
    1x1 stippled rectangle          24800   10600    2.3
  10x10 stippled rectangle          13000   7310     1.8
100x100 stippled rectangle          944     792      1.2
500x500 stippled rectangle          62      32       1.9
    1x1 opaque stippled rectangle   7000    6390     2.6
  10x10 opaque stippled rectangle   5290    2500     2.1
500x500 opaque stippled rectangle   68      25       2.7

These figures support the rule my fingers already knew:  don't do
graphics under MacX; use X11R4 for that.  The beauty is we can have
both; it takes me maybe 30 sec. to switch from X11R4 to the Macintosh
desktop.
-- 

	-Charlie Neil (chn at lanl.gov)
	 Los Alamos National Laboratory (505) 665-0978