[rescue] DigitalServer 3305R/AS800 questions

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Chris Petersen wrote:
> > >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. 

The early SGI machines (1000/2000 series) used he PM1 board, which was the
same 68000 (or 68010) based processor complex used on the Sun1's, This
processor board was originally designed at stanford for they workstation
project. However SGI never produced graphics technology for SUN and
viceversa. They started with the same processor board. GL-1.x and sunOS
were fairly different, seem sun took a more BSDish approach.


> > 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).

Sun and Windows never really got the graphics market. That is why you will
always (at least for the near future) still need SGI and E&S.....