Large wall display systems can be quite complicated with many monitors of varying resolutions, mixed orientation (landscape or portrait), arrayed as a single xscreen or a mixture of xscreen per monitor and/or one or more "strretched desktops" that cover multiple monitors. Paper (pdf, 7MB) explains how Summit HX Series makes the configuration easy by using Xi Graphics' graphical configurator utility.

The ability to record all or portions of X sessions for later playback for tranining or forensic analyxix can be quite a challenge if the system has multiple large monitors, deep color drpths, and tight specifications for "stutter" of the displayed images, such as in an Air Traffic Contorl.. Here is a white paper on the subject and a brief on the SECAP option in Accelerated-X.

"I'm having problems with my Linux graphics driver" is a frequent comment from Linux users. Many are surprised to learn that Linux (the Linux Group) does not make graphics drivers or X servers or X Window System graphics sub-systems. Well, then, who does make the graphics SW delivered with Linux kernels? PDF,

Much gnashing of teeth in the open source Linux community is in evidence in several forums. One particularly interesting Aug2005 post is entitled "The State of Linux Graphics by Jon Smirl. A comparison is presented in the The State of Accelerated-X, a PDF of about 10MB.

Not to pick on ATI necessarily, but they seem to have a particularly hard time trying to "please" the "open source community" with their Linux graphics drivers. Maybe this paper will explain some of the reasons behind the situation (PDF, 1MB), most of which is covered in some of the larger documents above.

At the request of a customer, XiG provided Summit HX Series WallDisplay support for an IBM card on an IBM Power5 platform running AIX. The comparison of results of that card running with XiG X support SW vs IBM's SW was instructive. Here is a small "Case Study" writeup, and a page on the card's performance in the comparison.

From the graphics sub-system standpoint, the important hardware items of interest besides the specific graphics chip are the specific memory chip used with the graphics and bus bridge chip specifications. If the graphics chip uses one or more external RAM DACs, the specifications of this hardware is also essential. Xi Graphics generaly does not rely on the the BIOS associated with the graphics hardware except for some basic initialization of the graphics chip. The CPUs used are most often PPC and Intel x86s, but others can be supported.

Summit Series graphics software has been designed to minimize interaction with the operating system kernel. The benefits of this approach are manyfold, including isolation of effects of changes of one on the other. Also, the porting task when changing OSs is much easier. By comparison the X.org approach requires much more interaction with the Linux kernel for support of graphics related operations. The result is often less than optimum performance, and any changes to either the kernel or the graphics software or hardware can be painful.

Embedded graphics applications often imply products that have a long manufacturing and maintenance life. The availibility of long term supply of the hardware is one thing; the avalibility of stable software and long term maintenance for it is another thing. Having supplied stable, high-performance graphics software to long running products such as medical and military systems for ten years, Xi Graphics has earned a reputation of high-quality software that needs little maintenance. (That is why our customer support is free).