Slashdot Mirror

Somehow, I think you are thinking of java and its ilk when you talk about dinky little 3d animations on a web page.

I wrote a weblication to convert molecular structure files to VRML-1 in order to be able to display them in a platform independent manner. Unfortunately the sorry state of VRML on Linux isnt helping the platform independence, but that is for another thread.

You can see some of the molecules I converted off of my page (click on the molecules button), or more directly off of the quickie weblication page for those with frames/graphics impaired browsers. I used either my tool (genVRML) or the wonderful VMD program which runs great on the SGIs and reasonably on the Linux machines.

I have also seen virtual museum walkthroughs on the web which allow visitors to get a feel for how they want to plan their visits. I have seen virtual astronomy and anatomy labs.

VRML is actually quite a good technology. Unfortunately you need a rather powerful machine with excellent graphics to do a good job at visualizing anything that is moderately complex. Your machine needs a fast OpenGL implementation and hardware texturing. This means once again, an SGI box or a nice Linux box with the accelerated X servers and the hardware stuff with Mesa.

Somehow, I think you are thinking of java and its ilk when you talk about dinky little 3d animations on a web page.

I wrote a weblication to convert molecular structure files to VRML-1 in order to be able to display them in a platform independent manner. Unfortunately the sorry state of VRML on Linux isnt helping the platform independence, but that is for another thread.

You can see some of the molecules I converted off of my page (click on the molecules button), or more directly off of the quickie weblication page for those with frames/graphics impaired browsers. I used either my tool (genVRML) or the wonderful VMD program which runs great on the SGIs and reasonably on the Linux machines.

I have also seen virtual museum walkthroughs on the web which allow visitors to get a feel for how they want to plan their visits. I have seen virtual astronomy and anatomy labs.

VRML is actually quite a good technology. Unfortunately you need a rather powerful machine with excellent graphics to do a good job at visualizing anything that is moderately complex. Your machine needs a fast OpenGL implementation and hardware texturing. This means once again, an SGI box or a nice Linux box with the accelerated X servers and the hardware stuff with Mesa.

~ spiderus ~

Today SGI released GLX source code, which will significantly accelerate the widespread development of accelerated 3d under Linux. It may not help today, but it is a big step. See:

http://www.sgi.com/software/opensource/glx/

For OpenGL graphics, you'll need either AccelX from Xi graphics , or Metro X with one of the supported cards.

However, the accelerated versions are RSN, which is not what you want, so you may be better off looking at an old Indy or Indogo2, either from the open market, or at SGI's remanufactured products page.

The SGI site for Linux, I think it would be a good idea to modifiy this a bit and include it in here.. Very cool. Seems like tux is wearing an SGI t-shirt :)
--

It would still have trouble catching up.

1. First, the TNT chipset has a much higher bandwidth to the cards onboard memory -- 1.8GBs is more than a typical G4 machine will have available, and if the machine does, it'll cost (recall the ~$150 tag on a Riva)
2. Second, the TNT has multiple texture processors, and so can do multi texturing more efficiently. Specifically, two single textured pixels per cycle or one dual textured pixel.
3. Third, TNT cards cost $150, so replacing it with a >$500 G4 is idiocy!!!

Its like saying that TNT's are all very well, but I'll be laughing when I get my new SGI Onyx2 InfiniteReality Overkill :-)

Try http://visual.sgi.com/research/ data/benchmarks.html for 2D and 3D benchmarks. These are preliminary results at product launch, the final
shipping drivers do significantly better.

www.SolarisCentral.org has a collection of links (under "/sparc") to used/refurbished Sun machine resellers.

good luck,
ccg