The driver takes full advantage of the new XAA (XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) in the SVGA server. In fact the ARK driver was the initial XAA development platform. Most common graphics operations are accelerated, including most types of rectangular and non-rectangular filling, screen-to-screen BitBLTs, line drawing, and text and bitmap expansion. Expect over 300k xstones on a 2MB ARK2000PV/MT.
At 24bpp, acceleration is less complete, but curiously, greyscale colors permit faster drawing. If you suspect a problem with acceleration, use the "noaccel" option. If text or bitmaps do not seem to be rendered correctly, you could try the "xaa_no_col_exp" option. To disable the pixmap cache, use "no_pixmap_cache".
The hardware cursor is disabled by default. With unmodified mode timings, there used to be two horizontal lines and a band following the mouse pointer over the screen. The driver now automatically modifies the mode timing to eliminate this effect; this has not been tested on all possible configurations. Use the "hw_cursor" option to enable the hardware cursor.
Linear addressing is the default mode of operation. If the server does not start correctly, you may want to try the "no_linear" option.
The older ARK1000VL is probably not compatible with acceleration. Use the "noaccel" and "no_linear" options.