The VESA driver will be much slower than a driver written for that graphics card. Is the machine slow generally, or is it just slow graphics-wise?
The Mobility Radeon X1600 was reported working on SXDE 2/07 according to this HCL entry: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/components/details/1517.html What happened after you installed Solaris on this machine - did X refuse to work? Andrew. This message posted from opensolaris.org
