[rescue] SGI tidbits

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Sep 28, 2002 at 07:43:23PM -0700, vraptor at employees.org wrote:
> SGI tidbit:
> 
> I had lunch with the SGI QA guy who handles ILM the other day,
> he told me a couple of interesting things...
> 
> 1) If you are doing non-graphic work with your SGI, don't bother
> going over 192MB of memory.

So, err, why do they sell Origins with several gigs of ram?
 
> 2) If you are working with Maya and texture maps, the O2 and
> the Onyx (memory is hazy on the 2nd--I remember the O2 because
> I have one) are the only ones that will handle in excess of 1GB
> texture maps.

The onyx doesn't take a gig of texture ram.  The only other SGI that
takes that much ram is the Onyx 3000 line with the just released IR4
board set.

OK, you can put in 4 RM boards with 256megs TRAM each into one of the
lesser IR machines and claim you have a gig of texture ram.  But, unlike
framebuffer space, TRAM isn't agregated.  So it is just 4 copies of the
same 256 megs of textures.

Now, as to Maya, I would hope they would have some good way of dealing
with such humoungous textures.  I've heard rumors of texture streaming
from ram being possible on SGIs, but if what you say is correct, then
Maya must not support it.

However, there are also things like scaling down the textures
automatically for previews that could be performed.
 
> I learned this when asking about how much I should boost the
> O2's memory, since it only has 160MB.  Apparently the OS loads
> itself up and pretty much stays there.  I guess they took a
> dim view of swapping with IRIX.

I wonder...

Cray took an extremely dim view on swapping, to the extent that they
didn't support it at all.  Now, wasn't the Irix 6.x line designed while
Cray was owned by and influencing the highend design at SGI?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd