Sun Ultra 5 - Graphics Card Options

[3pcedev]

Hi all,

I'm looking into upgrading from the onboard graphics on my Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 8. Basically the onboard ATI Rage chipset is pretty horrible and seems to be a bottleneck on the system.

What sort of card will be compatible? According to Sun literature the only 'official' options are the PGX32 and PGX64 cards. I looked into these but they both seem to use ATI Rage chipsets as well; plus the PGX64 only supports 3d via software rendering. Would either of these even be an improvement?

Ideally I want to run older 2d stuff like Quake, Doom etc. I would also like to look into some 3d stuff if possible (although the 366Mhz processor might end up being the bottleneck).

What do people recommend?

 

[lowen]

IIRC, the PGX32 and its twin, the Tech Source Raptor GFX, use a 3D Labs Permedia chipset. I have a few of these, but I never benchmarked them versus the ATI chip....

EDIT: link on the NETBSD wiki: https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/macallan/pgx32/

 

[Unknown_K]

Do you mean a PCI video card or one of those special SUN UPA cards that fits in the Ultra 10 towers?

 

[lowen]

The Raptor GFX is PCI. While the U5 does have a fully functional UPA slot, there is not enough room for a UPA card.

EDIT: I have I think 3 U5 boxes and two U10's, and maybe 7 of the Panther (501-4559) ATX-compatible motherboards that are very similar in design and use the same UltraSPARC CPU modules as the U5/10. They all have 440MHz CPUs.

 

[3pcedev]

Do you mean a PCI video card or one of those special SUN UPA cards that fits in the Ultra 10 towers?

I think lowen is right; it has a UPA slot but it looks like the card will foul on just about everything.

Looks like the PGX32 is the way to go. I came across a website which suggested the PGX32 is superior to the PGX64 as the 64 still uses an ATI Rage which causes issues with certain 2d operations. I'll order one and post back with some results once it arrives.