| The name says it all - "Accelerated-X." The Summit Series graphics software makes full use of hardware acceleration that is available on a graphics chip/card to provide the highest performance available from the hardware. That is one of the reasons Summit Series SW is referred to as premium. Here are a few examples where the feature is important.
Multiple Monitors
Installations that use X.org X servers generally suffer from the inability of the X servers to provide hardware acceleration on more than the first monitor in the system. Hence a graphics card that can support two, three or even four monitors will have one monitor's view accelerated, but the remaining monitors will have unaccelerated views - meaning pretty low relative performance. Summit Series products provide full hardware acceleration (to the limits of the hardware) for all monitors in a system. That's the way it should be, isn't it?
OpenGL Operations
Graphics chip/card manufacturers go to great length and expense to provide hardware in their 3D engines to speed up operations used to create and rasterize 3D graphics. Some UNIX/Linux graphics sub-system providers, however, do not take full advantage of this specialized hardware. And we are not just talking about pixel and vertex shaders, either. To get an idea of the value of OpenGL hardware acceleration, just compare a system using the Mesa OpenGL pipeline (software only) to a system that uses full hardware acceleration for OpenGL. OpenGL systems that rely on Mesa will have poor performance. Summit Series SW, on the other hand, offers the best overall hardware accelerated OpenGL system performance available.
Rotate
This little feature can save bucks on hardware - by avoiding specialized portrait monitors - but can reduce a system's performance considerably unless the feature is hardware accelerated. And most UNIX/Linux graphics support software providers do not accelerate the Rotate feature. For systems that employ multiple, large rotated monitors, unaccelerated performance may make the system unusable.
Image Overlay Plane
Some graphics chips have a feature known as overlay plane support as a hardware feature. This allows pop-up menus and other varying - usually simple - images to be superimposed on the underlying main image plane without disturbing the covered (temporarily obscured) main image pixels. When the pop-up menu goes away, the underlying pixels do not have to be re-rasterized, which speeds up the system's performance. Even though some have referred to the overlay plane as a "toy" that might have some use, some applications are able to substantially improve system performance by using this "toy" in applications such as Air Traffic Control and Computer Aided Design, to name just two. Xi Graphics' sub-system graphics SW has made use of overlay plane support since the feature was invented. Nowadays, few graphics chips manufacturers provide the feature (Matrox, VIA (S3) and 3Dlabs (Creative) are exceptions), and the freeware X servers generally do not make use of it. Pity.
|