Most of you will be familiar with Silicon Graphics, Inc., once the proud leader in the graphics workstations market with their high-end MIPS workstations, running the UNIX System V based IRIX operating system. The company has been in steady decline for a long time now, and two years ago it put an end to its MIPS product line, favouring processors from Intel. Back to IRIX - it has many assets and good features (XFS, for instance), and the IRIX Interactive Desktop was certainly one of them. Sadly, it never properly made its way out of IRIX, but this is now being worked on, with the full support from SGI.
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Member since:2006-02-06
The thing that most of us like about MaXX, is that it isn't flashy, it's simple and it's fast. Plus, MaXX is GPU accelerated, not GPU enhanced like OS X, or Vista. It uses the GPU to off load the graphics processing from the CPU, not to add eye candy that ends up making the whole system just as slow as a non-GPU version.
Member since:2008-03-17
As far as I'm aware all major modern window managers and toolkit offload operations in various degrees to the gpu.
The fact that they are using a compositing manager suggests that they too want a certain degree of "enhancing", because compositing involves extra operations so it will be slower than drawing pixmaps directly to the frame buffer. What compositing does is that makes it appear smoother i.e. no flashing when pixmaps update or pixmap tearing (because textures are updated off screen and then shown).
Edited 2008-10-09 14:16 UTC
Member since:
2006-05-30
... I'm not intereseted in starting a flame thread, BUT ...
Can somebody please tell me what is so special about "yet another wm for X.org"?
I never used a SGI Workstation and when I'm looking at the screenshot I would call it a windowmanager clone.
It would be great if the article was telling me something about the product beside the fact that it exists.
Best Regards