Thought I'd write a quick thread about the GXT135P adapter sold for various PowerPC/POWER systems as the cards come up occasionally and they are by no means bad but just a little lacklustre (It falls under the FRUs 00P5758 and 80P4527). It's actually a
Matrox G450 with the Open Firmware BIOS instead of the x86 one. The G450 manual makes a quick note about this as they were knowingly supporting machines with alternative firmware:
Quote:G450-based PCI graphics cards are recommended for computers with Intel chipsets. With non-Intel chipsets, features and performance may be limited. Specifically, the bus mastering feature may not be supported and, as a result, the DualHead DVDMax feature may not be supported and OpenGL acceleration may not be available.
So the reason why Matrox put that cautionary in is because it's up to the OS vendor to implement those features, and in the case of AIX the driver wasn't really fully polished up. Unlike the GXT6500P and GXT4500P, the GXT135P can run on any OS more or less and Linux does support it; I haven't checked what the POWER Linux support is on it these days, but I'm going to say the open source stuff most likely has OpenGL.
Now there was a company called Xi Graphics (XiG) who was creating closed-source X server re-implementations dubbed "Accelerated-X" (I can't speak to how popular they were because I only came to learn of who they were WHEN looking for information on AIX GPUs; but with all of the
diatribe about open source X.org being bad and their implementations being nine-thousand times better, they sure didn't uphold on that and their company's assets are just a dead flapping fish talking about forgotten aspects of X.org and Xfree86 which probably deserves its own unique thread). They had a client in Germany who wanted to use their AIX systems with the existing Matrox graphics cards which had two outputs -- but AIX limited the G450 to only one output at a time. XiG ended up creating a 3rd party driver that allowed both video ports to be used, spanning capabilities within X11 and unlocked the ability to use OpenGL on the cards. They had a lot of different Accelerated-X mainly for Linux and Solaris, but the one developed for AIX was specifically called:
Accelerated-X™ Summit Series Wall Display (HX) Series.
Of course the XiG public website
eventually pulled down the AIX URLs (
specifically the AIX ones and not the Linux or Solaris ones) and scrubbed it from the FTP which is no longer up anyways. And they are adamant about not selling anything to new clients except existing ones. But even if I could contact them to buy their AIX driver, these are the following questions we're faced with:
- Would it really be worth it for $1289 USD? I could probably set a bounty for that instead lol
- Does this no-longer-developed-now-of-spec-X driver even run on anything past AIX 6.1?
- What's the point of trying to run the Matrox cards from a 3rd party when they've already gave up on their own solution when IBM still supports their cards (which are insanely widely available on the second-hand market) on AIX 7.1?
At the end of the day it would have been nice to have the XiG driver to see what could be done with the Matrox G450 on AIX but at this point it'd be easier just to cobble something from open source code and forget about the Accelerated-X nonsense. I'd be easier on XiG if they actually stuck to their word and actually sold something of substance than just complain and trash X.org when they're not even around anymore and X.org is.
Now in regards to the NATIVE support that AIX has on the GXT135P aka G450 -- well it's pretty much that. No OpenGL support, you can only use one of the video outputs at a time and performance is weak. It's the worst card you could use on AIX, but it wouldn't be a 'bad' card under POWER Linux. I personally feel that just using multiple GXT4500Ps is the way to go for AIX graphical acceleration until someone writes a better driver with a newer card. If you want to use a POWER/PowerPC machine with Linux it's an OK card -- that's pretty much the verdict.
