[rescue] DigitalServer 3305R/AS800 questions

[Chris Petersen]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 12:21:28PM -0400, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 09:34:17AM -0400, Chris Petersen wrote:
> 
> > Spelling correct.  And a good question, what *did* happen with Kubota?  The
> > Kubota Denali was some hot stuff back in '94, we were drooling over the
> > opportunity to get our hands on one at the time to try out with our
> > 3000/600s & Unigraphics.
> > 
> > However, Kubota lost it's funding and basically shut up shop back in '95. 
> > Here's a fairly poorly-written history highlight:
> > 
> > http://research.microsoft.com/~hollasch/misc/kubota.html
> 
> >From that page, "(Note: this was back when SGI was only building graphics boards to put in Sun workstations!!)."  
> 
> When was SGI doing that?
> 

Early, early days.  Realize that SGI as a company originated from a set of
Stanford students that were colleagues/peers of the same set that started
Sun.  Forget all the actual names of the perpetrators at the moment, but I'm
sure if you do some digging online you can find a good early history. 

> Also, on a related note, how "correct" are the wildcats?  Do they support a 
> decent number of buffers?  NT is really annoying in only supporting two.  What
> if I want stereo double buffered display with a hidden buffer for picking UV
> coordinates?  That's 5 buffers right there.  Cut it down from stereo, and it
> is still 3, meaning that you can't use the easy route for a texture painting
> program while also maintaining a smooth display.  But, that is an NT problem,
> it doesn't have to be a wildcat problem.  What about things like convolution
> acceration, the whole opengl imaging, accumlation buffers, etc?
> 

Hmm, I'm not a graphics "expert" at that level, but here's the specs for the
latest Wildcat (the 6110):

http://www.3dlabs.com/product/wildcatIII_6110_index.htm

There's also a 6210 now.  From what I saw, you should be able to pull the
answers to most of your questions from those sources.  As for NT only
supporting two buffers, I know there are a *lot* of limitations in NT
drivers these days (we see it all the time @ UG when dealing with high-end
modeling applications).  Since the elephants have stampede to NT/2000 
workstations in the engineering marketplace I'm hoping we'll at least see
some improvement here.  I'm just glad Sun finally has stepped up to the
plate again to keep refreshing their workstation lineup so there's some
alternatives out there.  Sun seems to go through odd phases of completely
ignoring the workstation market, half-assed efforts, and then a shining star
occasionally (although they're still not real budget-comparable at a
hardware/OS level to the Windows workstations, which can arguably be called
real workstations in every aspect but the intel chip and the Microsoft OS).

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen			  E-mail: havoc at apk.net
Systems Engineer, ExperTeam Services, EDS PLM Solutions