🚀 go-pugleaf

gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) writes:
>Release 3.0 comes with Renderman, which brings up the following question.
>
>For those people who have the money to own a NeXTdimension board, what part  
>of the system is doing most of the rendering work?  Is it the 68040 on the  
>NeXTcube, or is it the i860 processor which is in the NeXTdimension board?
>
>I'd suspect it's the 68040, but I'd like to think that Interactive Renderman  
>would be able to take advantage of the features & speed of the i860.

I was told that the i860 does run some of the Interactive stuff.
Unfortunately I have not been able to see it in action though!
When I talked to the designer, he mentioned that performance is
much better than 68k.  However, sometimes the i860 requires some
very careful assembler level optimization to really make it scream.
At the time of PR2, he mentioned that there was not enough time/resources
to do this optimization.  This is understandable, considering that there
were still bugs to iron out.


I would still like to know why N3DCameraView promotes
itself to 16 bits on greyscale machines.  Performance
of this view really dogs out.  I suspect it
has to do with dithering.

Stuart