On NeXTdimension and Renderman - Who does most the work? - Thread - go-pugleaf

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3 total messages Started by Garance A. Drosehn Fri, 09 Oct 1992 17:32

On NeXTdimension and Renderman - Who does most the work?

#806

Author: Garance A. Drosehn
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1992 17:32

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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.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA

Re: On NeXTdimension and Renderman - Who does most the work?

#814

Author: Stuart Ritchie
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1992 22:11

26 lines
1696 bytes

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

Re: On NeXTdimension and Renderman - Who does most the work?

#822

Author: Manuel Alberto Ricart
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1992 22:15

8 lines
756 bytes

Rumor has it that there's substantial i860 code on the Renderman code.
From what I've seen, it is a bit snappier when run on a system with 
a NeXTDimension. But then, It may just be DPS acting faster...

-- 
Manuel Alberto Ricart
alberto@parsec.mixcom.com <NeXTMail Welcome>

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