[rescue] DigitalServer 3305R/AS800 questions

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 01:24:14PM -0400, Chris Petersen wrote:
 
> 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).

All those new wildcats are so expensive.  I still love the Wildcat 4000,and
it is affordable, but the third party wildcat xservers don't support older than
some 5000 model.

Yes, OpenGL imaging in hardware is there.  What else...  Hmm, never heard of
the NEC TE5 before...  Not entirely sure what the deal with volumetric textures
is, though I could guess.  Hmm, there is a hardware accumulation buffer (hello
real time motion blur!!!).  Now if only the relatively correct products (which
SGIs and Wildcats seem to be the only ones who are) would add support for 
per-vertex and per-pixel shaders, that would rock.  But, I'm not sure what 
benefit that offers other than for game type things.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd