🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4d7rp7$e7d@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, rexniger@aol.com (Rex Niger) writes:

|>    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
Well, a slight argument here:
	(a) Whether it's a luxury or not depends on what you're doing.
	(b) Despite SGI's skill in this ara ... we always have customers
	who want *more* (both more at a specific price, at more at almost
	any price) and know what they'd do with it if they could get get it!
	I must admit, it is frustraing to talk with a research head of a
	Fortune50 company who says: "If you can do XXX, we'd buy 50 of them,
	whatever they cost, otherwise we'll buy 1 of your fastest."
	A: sorry, we can't do that yet.
	"So when?"
	A: sometime after the year 2001 we'll get fast enough.

<good discussion of accelerators>
. 

|> >>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.

of more-or-less-current products [Extremes are 2.5 years old, and rapidly
	being replaced by Impacts] from top to bottom:

			hardware geometry				
Onyx	RealityEngine2	Y
	VTX		Y
	Extreme		Y
Indigo2	Maximum Impact	Y (2 Geometry/Image engines, 960MFLOPs for transforms)
	High Impact	Y (1 Geometry/Image engine, 480 MFLOPs for transforms)
	Extreme		Y
	XZ		Y (4 GE7 geometry engines, 400 MFLOPs for transforms)
	XL		N
Indy	XZ		Y
	XL/24bit	N
	XL/8bit color	N

So, as  I said in an earlier post, even if most of what you do uses
hardware geometry acceleration, there's always one lower price point,
at least, where you can reduce the price of the graphics board by omitting
the hardware acceleration.  Note that a given application may be:
	(1) Light on CPU and graphics
	(2) Light on CPU, heavy on graphics
	(3) Heavy on CPU, light on graphics
	(4) Heavy on CPU, heavy on graphics
and people buy different systems to cover these, although they do like to
be able to run the same binaries.

If it seems weird to have this many variation, it's sometimes hard to
explain: it's easier to see.  A good demo is when we show people around
our demo center, starting with a rotating lighted model:
	a) On an Indy, it's OK, flat-shaded.
	b) On an Indigo2 Extreme, it's OK Gouraud-shaded.
	   But go back to the Indy, turn the Gouraud on, it slows down.
	c) On an Indigo2 Impact, it's fine with reflection-mapping.
	   Go back to the Extreme, try that ... and it basically stops.
	   Do not go back to the Indy.
Put another way, everybody does graphics demoes that look good, by making sure
that the machine can do the job ... it's only when you see two systems
side-by-side trying to do the same thing, with 10:1 to 1000:1 differences,
that the differences become truly obvious.

	
-------

-- 
-john mashey    DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
UUCP:    mash@sgi.com 
DDD:    415-933-3090	FAX: 415-967-8496
USPS:   Silicon Graphics 6L-005, 2011 N. Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA 94039-7311