Sun Solaris graphics

Java 2D
#1

i have access to these terminals at uni, pretty sure they are sun solaris things. (they log onto a server, and are pretty similar to unix in some ways)

anyway, the monitor/box thing has the Sun logo at the top and even the mouse has it on it. very high resolution. they dont seem to have an on/off switch.

anyway, that has nothing to do with java2d, but this does:

i was messing around and thought i’d test my tetris game out on one of these things… i grabbed my current version… it ran horribly. seems that even using bufferstrategy, these things only refresh the display when user hits a key or moves the mouse within the window… grabbed an old version of the tetris game that does more rendering (where it is not really needed) worked poorly as well.

grabbed my latest ‘release quality’ version, which i only just recently discovered i had not lost the source for as i thought… it worked quite alright. apart from being slower than on my windows box, but that’s to be expected - these things are dumb terminals and there are a lot of them all being used, eating up the CPU of our server…
the game was a bit sluggish but playable.

i narrowed it down by trial and error to the display of the semitransparent blocks that are used to guide the player (show him where the piece will fall if they press drop)

why would rendering something that is not supposed to be accellerated cause a performance increase in this case? do the cached images get cached onto the servers gfx card vram and thus arent updated on the local machine? i would have thought that it would cache them into the vram on the terminal…

#2

hm, i took a screenshot but i cant upload it anywhere here cause the only internet access we get is through a www-proxy. (or if i am on windows, i can log into my home pc which is on the VPN via remote desktop)

a whole OS in the lovely motif L&F… wonderful

if anyone wants me to test something on one of these terminals, send me a PM. but i have a quota so nothing over a couple megs.

#3

Are those terminals by any chance SunRays?

If so, it’d explain poor java2d performance.

#4

yeah i they are. i remember seeing that word somewhere on the OS. probably the login screen.

but i still dont know why accellerated images are drawn slower than unaccel’d ones.

here’s screenie. i dont get why it’s all dithered like that. i thought i opened it to check it after saving it… hm mustn’t have

http://www.adam.com.au/kellyjones/picsused/SunRay.gif

can anyone tell me a bit about these things? do they have their own gfx for instance? seems quick enough… but scrolling stuff, particularly pdf is slow. i get about 8 fps on that game.

edit – and about 2-4 fps on balls.jar with only a couple on screen. (i havent tried switching it to alpha on that demo. i’ll try it on tuesday)

#5

This is because of the way SunRays work.

Double-buffered applications are especially bad for them.

If the app is not double-buffered and renders directly to the screen using X11 primitives, the sunray software can just send the X commands (well, sort of) to the terminal. But in the case of double-buffered apps what being copied to the screen are images, a collection of bits, which just has to be streamed to the terminal. This is way slower than just passing the primitives, thus such bad performance.

You can try to speed it up a bit by setting the following env. variable - J2D_PIXMAPS=shared …

The real answer is that SunRays are not designed for this kind of applications…