> A number of graphically-oriented systems are "faster" in X than in console
> mode.  This includes sparc, sparc64, macppc, probably others.  That's
> considered normal. :)
>
> Nick.

I believe the cause is the video hardware.  The PC video hardware has always
had built-in text-mode with built-in (or loadable) text fonts.  As such, the
PC video cards can render text very quickly and OpenBSD (and pretty much any
other UNIX-like system for i386) takes advantage of that.  However, for the
macppc, sparc/sparc64, and pretty much anything that uses a framebuffer,
text rendering is done through software, not the hardware, so it's far
slower.

If you happened to have an old Sun or Mac around, you can see how slow by
getting into Openboot (Sun) or Openfirmeware (Mac) and see just how slow
display performance is.

--
Jordan Klein                     ~  Beware of dragons
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                  ~  for you are crunchy
Solaris / OpenBSD / Linux Admin  ~  and go well with ketchup

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