🚀 go-pugleaf

>>Pshaw. This is meaningless for at least 2 reasons. First, 604 computers
do not have any price advantage over Pentium Pro computers. 

  Actually has anyone done a comparison? There are so few P6 systems
floating around their price is probably still a bit high. 

>>Second,
nobody in their right minds would do 3d without hardware acceleration,

   Actually people have been doing it for years. 3D acceleration is a
great but expensive luxury, I think people are more drawn to the SGI
because of the powerful software that's available for it.  Remember not
every SGI has 3D acceleration, yet because it's an SGI it can run Alias,
SoftImage, Gig3DGO, etc. 

>>and the options for that will be fairly equal on both platforms with
maybe a small price advantage on the PC side.

   Actually FPU performance is quite important for real-time 3D, because
the main CPU usually has to transform the polygons before sending them to
the 3D accelerator. Just about all 3D accelerators in the market place
work like that, Glint, Permedia, nVidia, Verite, Apple's, Matrox's, etc. 
  If you notice 3D accelerator companies almost never say how many
polys/sec. their boards actually render on a given system, instead they'll
state that their chipset can do up to say 500,000 polys/sec. Mind you no
current PCs or Macs are capable of providing those boards with enough
transformed polygons to produce that figure. They are lucky if they can
pull a third that figure.
   In short P6s will probably not be as good as equivalent 604 and 604e
systems when it comes to driving 3D accelerators. What the disparity will
be is anybody's guess.

>>It's the accelerators that made SGI such a hot item, not "its" CPUs.

   I'm pretty sure that their Impact series of accelerators transforms the
polygons as well as rasterizes them, but I don't know about the Extremes
and other earlier accelerators. They could very well have worked like the
one's now shipping for PCs and Macs.

Later,
-Eric