Harold & Mark, To contribute to the discussion:
I see the same problem when running Matlab. In my case Matlab is run on a Compaq/HP Tru64 computer with the GUI displayed on my Windows PC running cygwin/xfree in multiwindow mode. I also have a commercial X server (xwin32) available on my PC. Display of Matlab graphics, or even updating of the icons in Matlab window menubar are considerably slower when running via cygwin/xfree - the graphics benchmarks that Matlab provide run approximately 100 times slower under cygwin/xfree than under xwin32. Trials of other commercial X servers indicated that some are slow and some are quick, probably due to the reason given by Harold. An in-house, graphically intensive, X program run under the same setup as above does not show such a marked difference. One point of difference is that the Matlab GUI is written entirely in Java, while the other program uses GTK. Regards Gavin On 24 Sep 2003 at 22:27, Harold L Hunt II wrote: > Mark, > > Using the default -multiwindow mode (with the integrated window manager) > is slower than all of the other modes. > > You can run XWin from startxwin.bat instead with: > > XWin -rootless > > Then you need to start a window manager like 'twm': > > run twm > > > Cygwin/XFree86 works by drawing to an offscreen framebuffer (using the > primary CPU), then transferring updated portions of the offscreen > framebuffer to the screen. Work has begun, and is also essentially > stalled, on the "Native GDI" engine for Cygwin/XFree86 that translates > each X graphics call to a GDI graphics call; this has the advantage of > utilizing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU). Exceed and > possibly other commercial X Servers do something similar to the Native > GDI engine and are thus faster. > > On a side note, the speed of your graphics card and the quality of its > drivers are very important for the performance of Cygwin/XFree86. A two > or three year old ATI or NVIDIA PCI (AGP is better) graphics card will > be substantially faster than a 5 year old PCI graphics card from a > no-name vendor. On the other hand, I use a 5 year old Diamond PCI > graphics card and it works just fine. > > That's about it. > > Harold > > Mark Jones wrote: > > I have tried using XFree86 (linux and cygwin) for Cygwin's XFree86 and > > Linux's XFree86 and have found it to be extremely slow at refreshing the > > screen making it nearly impossible to use MATLAB's editor reasonably. > > However, using a MS Windows emulator like Xoftware or Hummingbird's Exceed > > provides extremely fast response such that it is useable with various programs > > including MATLAB. Is there a valid reason for this? Is it being addressed? > > > > Thanks, > > > > Mark > > > >