🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan21.052834.29868@cc.gatech.edu>, zundel@cc.gatech.edu (Eric Zundel Ayers) writes:
|> 
|> 1) In a scene with  160 spheres, rendering takes from 3 - 9 seconds,
|>    and rotations in the renderer take between 5 and 10 seconds. 
|>    This is on the edge of what we have defined as "interactability"
|> 
|> 2) In a scene with 1200 spheres (which is not uncommon in the kind of 
|>    data we are working with right now) Times increase to well over a
|>    minute to render but still around 10 seconds to rotate.  
|> 
|> 3) In a scene with 2500 spheres, the renderer has lots of problems,
|>    with rendering time increasing exponentially for each attempt to
|>    render the same scene.(first 2 minutes, then 4 minutes, then 8 minutes...) 

Spheres take a long time to draw, regardless. If you want interactivity
in rotating 2000 spheres, you're going to need a graphics controller with
hardware for fast sphere rendering. 

Does SGI have anything like this? In the Reality Engine or something? I'm
not intimate with the different levels of graphics boards on SGI just yet.

The only system I've used that actually has this is a Stardent 750 with
G3 graphics board (hardware spheres, multipass transparency, and texture
mapping). The sphere hardware came from older Stellar workstations.

On my Stardent system, I can rotate a 2000-sphere molecule as if it was in
my hand.
-- 
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Scott Ferguson                        Exxon Research & Engineering Co.
Project Engineer                      New Jersey
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"When I was your age son, dogs didn't even have the right to vote!"
(J. Seinfeld)