[rescue] Wow, 30k Graphics Card From Sun

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> Oh, and they say 1gig of texture ram, but I bet that in reality it is
> effectively going to act like it is closer to 256.  Base on their
> description, it sounds like the system will need to duplicate some
> textures (perhaps a lot of textures) between the different texture
> rams.  Perhaps they are sharing the texture memory between processors
> though.

Texture memory is specific to each rasterizing unit (4) but they by no
means require identical contents.  Effective texture size will be 1GB if
the application uses targeted textures.  See the white paper.

> Also, I don't see anything mentioned about 16bit color, or more than 2
> displays per pipe, and you are limited to only 2 pipes.

No, max is 12 bits per channel.  Mach banding is not much of an issue.

> OK, so this is a nice card.  But for crying out loud.  Reading this
> release is like reading an Intel release where they claim to be faster
> than other platforms because they can do more 32bit FLOPS in a certain
> amount of time than other platforms can do 64bit FLOPS.

Antialiasing (arguably one of the biggest plusses at the level of the IR
series) is comparable.  Geometry perf may well be surperior, it's hard to
tell.

Unless I'm mistaken, IR4 is only 48-bit (12 bits per channel).  I haven't
gotten the chance to play with one yet.

One nice underhyped thing about this board is that it can do realtime zero
speed-loss output scaling.  This is not limited merely to integer pixel
doubling and it can be done per-frame.  It effectively allows for smooth
fallback in the number of pixels calculated while maintaining frame rate.

What do you see as a weak spot other than the fact that it can only drive
2 displays?  This can be a deficiency, but I suspect that it isn't for the
market that Sun is selling into.  This isn't a "high-end IR4 killer", it's
a "low end Onyx2/high end Octane killer" (IMHO).  You can drop one of
these into a Blade 2k and have a remarkably powerful box.

The prototype looks nifty (again, see the SAGE paper).

-James