[rescue] honkingest OpenGL box made by who?

[Chris Byrne]

I have a GeForce 3 in my PC and all I can say is Whoa Mama. When I was in
college (less than 10 years ago) it took about a million bucks worth of
computing equipment several days to do what this thing does in a few
seconds.

I also have a couple of systems with Wildcats, a couple with Permedias and I
had three O2's and the GF3 could stand up right there with all of them if it
had lots of memory and OpenGL optimized drivers.

Now it's still not up to the REALLY HUGE textures, say the 4096x2304 that
you need minimum to render a full digital film for cinema playback. Actually
from what I understand companies like Lucas arts render things at between 4x
and 16x oversample then downsample to the appropriate resolution for the
media because it leaves far less in the way of artifacts, and allows a much
finer LOD etc... etc...

What I'm really waiting for at the consumer end is the four chip quadra
implementation with 512meg of DDR texture memory. That bad boy should be
able to render better than dvd resolution & quality, fully textured & lit in
realtime (24 to 48 fps) with full effects etc...

It'd be kinda fun having my own annanova or realmodel running on my desktop
realtime ;-)

On the Mac front, unfortunately the nvidia drivers for macs run WAY behind
the pc drivers in performance, at least as of about three months ago. Nvidia
just released a new driver set that I havent had time to play with as of
yet, and I'm not sure if they updated the Mac vid support.

Chris Byrne


----- Original Message -----
From: "Joshua D Boyd" <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 7:56 PM
Subject: Re: [rescue] honkingest OpenGL box made by who?


> 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
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