Remember this thread (https://zigzagjoe.com/forumarchive/5921.html)? Well,
@turbolent released an enhancement for the VESA VBE 2.0 graphics driver (https://github.com/turbolent/FramebufferWC) that ships with OPENSTEP 4.2, and the results are insane.
BEFORE PATCH:
AFTER PATCH:
For clarity, the previous record for a performance beast was Apple2guy's 'mordor' machine, which got a blistering 20.715, beating my brief lead of 18.510. But with turbolent's patch, a VirtualBox VM went from a respectable 10.318 to an absolutely face-melting
206.642!!! The magic depends on a slightly newer CPU feature, memory-type range registers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_type_range_register), which were introduced in the Pentium Pro. Basically, all the draw commands that comprise a screen update are being sent in a burst over the bus instead of in tiny chunks, which was a major bottleneck specifically for the VBE driver.
Needless to say, this far outstrips the performance of all other available drivers for NeXT graphics. The same machine I used to set 18.510 now gets
264.360, which is an absolutely absurd number that theoretically means it's as fast as 264.36 stock 030 NeXTcubes (though I have my doubts about such a comparison.)
vbe-speed.png
Alas, the VBE driver is still vintage 90s tech, so it only has support for 4:3 resolutions, up to and including 1600x1200. I am keenly awaiting for turbolent to get back to me to see if we can squeeze 1920x1080 onto the list somehow.
In the mean time, go compile and install it (https://github.com/turbolent/FramebufferWC/archive/refs/heads/main.zip) so you can get a new high score! It's pretty painless under VirtualBox; you don't need to mess with the VM's hardware configuration, just swap out the drivers that the guest machine uses, and follow the instructions in the project's README.md. After rebooting I also needed to bump up the resolution from undefined (640x480x8, it seemed) to 1280x1024x32. (Reminder: Workspace Manager stores your dock contents on a per-screen-resolution basis, so don't freak out when you log back in and everything is missing...)
I have attached a prebuilt copy of the .config, but you'll still need to run the patcher as root and edit Instance0.table to actually ensure FramebufferWC is loaded properly.
Super cool. Does the driver work under emulators? That would give it a heck of a kick.
Quote from: ZombiePhysicist on Aug 25, 2026, 06:40 PMSuper cool. Does the driver work under emulators? That would give it a heck of a kick.
My shot was from VirtualBox (i386 guest—or, well, I guess it's an i686 guest now!) on an amd64 Windows PC, so there was no slowdown due to CPU emulation. The guest definitely has to be white hardware since this is a Pentium CPU feature being hacked into an i386 driver. I am not sure what turbolent used; you may have to find out for yourself how it behaves under 86box.