[rescue] honkingest OpenGL box made by who?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 01:43:33PM -0400, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> which workstation maker makes the fastest/most powerful OpenGL boxes?

SGI Onyx 3k, at least until you put a price cap on...
 
> Let's keep the price (new) for the workstation under $20k just to have a
> basis for comparison.  And let's include texture performance in the
> equation.
> 
> SGI o2+ with the R12k? 
> HP's? Sun?

The best for texturing (and it turn volumetric rendering to my
understanding) is by far the O2.  However, it doesn't do geometry very
well.

For everything else, it is hard to say.  A used Octane would be extremely
nice, but Sun just came out with a card based on the Wildcat chipset, so
it should give everything a pretty strong run for the money.  But, I don't
know if it is possible to get a machine with that new card for under $20k.

Also, a dual G4 running OS X and the GeForce 3 card should not be sneezed
at.  Assuming that Mac OS X isn't doing anything stupid (I refuse to
recommend a PC, but I've only used this card in a PC), this setup will be
extremely fast, allow things that are virtually impossible on other
platforms (thanks to the vertex programmable shading), and will be by far
the cheapest.  And in addition, NVidea has started cleaning up the math
starting with this card meaning less artifacts to plague professional
users.  If NVidea continues to improve the rendering quality, in another
two generations or so, I think that will outperform everything but a
highend Onyx2 and be good enough for on doing on air work in real time.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd