[rescue] SGI Systems available

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 06:42:16PM +0200, Gerhard Lenerz wrote:

> > As I understand it, for heavy 3D the R5000/180 is better with the XL24.
> 
>   I don't have either XZ for Indy nor 180MHz R5000 but I always wanted
>   to give at least a try with XZ on R5000/150 (in comparison to
>   XL8/24). I believe on R5000 XL isn't always superior to XZ graphics,
>   but so far I haven't found the means to try it.

The case when a R5k/XZ combination would be best would be when the
geometry doesn't over welm the XZ, but getting the geometry requires a
lot of work.  Off the top of my head, I would imagine that this might
describe some scientific applications, where you are doing visualization
of a simulation.
 
> > Wether or not the 3D engines on the XZ can be not used (which would
> > allow you to do the 3D calcs on the R5000 and just use the XZ as a
> > dumb (ala XL24) framebuffer) I do not know.
> 
>   As far as I know the the hardware 3D engines are used as soon as
>   they are present. My bet is that R5K/XZ is nice (in quite relative
>   terms) when doing light 3D stuff with a small amount of textures, as
>   3D would be done on the graphics board while texture calculations
>   could be done on the CPU (but I might be terribly wrong here).