>Posting exactly this kind of bullshit is what has pretty much made most of the remaining Amiga users the >laughing stock of the internet. One would've thought these guys would learned better than to do this by >now. Shrug. Guess some people never learn....
Its just like many Linux-rumours and Linux-users. Wake me when Linux gets real OpenGL-support, and simple installation of drivers for different devices. Last time I heard something, it was Real Soon Now...
Shinobi - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
Re:What makes SGI great graphics machines...
on
NVIDIA and SGI Align
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· Score: 1
Ive used Maya on both platforms, and with small scenes, the Intergraph rocks, but as soon as you get over a certain scene-size,in my case 45Mb, the Intergraph becomes SLLLOOOOOWWWW, while O2s and the new NT-machines just happily speeds along. And the SGIs have higher memory-bandwidth to the system-memory than the Wildcat 4000 has onboard. And its less cost-prohibitive to upgrade with more memory.
Shinobi - Champion of Lady weeanna, Inquisitor Cult of Jolt "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
I talked to Chris Scott a few months ago, and they said that a BeOS-version is more likely than a Linux-version. That might have changed by now, however. And thats what I would like.
Shinobi - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
If Maya was ported to BeOS, I would definitely want a BeOS-cluster. CPU-usage simply depends on the level of complexity of your scenes/movies/animations. Ive been working several thousand hours with 3d-graphics, compositing and video-editing on several different platforms, including SGI/Irix, NT(Intergraphs mostly), Macs, under Linux and BSD and BeOS, and I can testify that a 300Mhz P2 is NOT enough for high-end work in above-mentioned fields. In mid-level work (A few thousand frames in 768*576) its quite easy to make 10 P2 Xeons to choke, and thats an optimized scene. Trust me, Im talking of my own experiences. With good programs for BeOS, and clustering-ability, BeOS could be a good contender, certainly better than Linux and *BSD because of their severe deficiencies in the graphics and computing-areas compared with BeOS. And I dont find BeOS proprietarity to be a problem. In fact, it seems to help rather than hinder in their case.
Shinobi - Inquisitor Cult of Jolt, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
Can we say "recode for LIntel"? Can we say "Needs a special X-server AND Windowmanager"? Sure, I knew you could...
And, when I talked with both tech-people and development-people at Alias|Wavefront(Having worked as a trainee for them has its advantages contact-wise), their answer was that they werent intending to develop Maya or any other tools for Linux, since it isnt as standardized and united as they want it. It would be more realistic for them to port Maya for BeOS for example.
Anders W - Inquisitor CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
Problem is, I finished school over a year ago, and I havent gotten any permanent job yet. My friends dont have room to have me living there etc.
I need the new computer to be able to work(Im the lead 3d-artist, and my parents dont want me to render on their machine). We have showed a demo here in Sweden. The problem is that the government doesnt give away grants for games development, and no company weve talked with has the nerve to invest in our project. I wont get a bank loan, since I dont have any money to back us...
Ive calculated that I need to work about 35 hours/week minimum to support myself. In short, me and my friends the programmers NEED to get paid for what we do.
MVH Anders W - Inquisitor CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway"
Ok, here I go. Some people here will flame me for this, but I find some of my experiences
Im currently involved in the development of a game currently on hold. The reason for it being on hold is that we cant afford to do it. Thats the true bottom line. We have spent thousands of hours on developing new algorithms for rendering, dynamics etc, just to get that little edge, on getting a good and thorough design, nice graphics, convincing sound-handling etc, all done in our spare time, when we were students at different schools here in Sweden. Some of our algorithms are more advanced and faster than some of IDs and 3D Realms, incredibly enough. Problem is, we dont want to release it open source, because of all the time weve spent on development on things that can be considered state-of-the-art. We dont want others to use OUR work, to achieve that status. Im out of school, unemployed, need to move away from my parents, and I need to get myself a new computer. Im waiting for answers from some companies. In the meantime, Im a poor guy who has to rely on my parents and friends to keep me fed and warm. Im constantly looking for a job. I dont have time or money to put into development, and I dont wanna give away thousands of hours of work just like that.
Another reason for keeping development proprietary is purely practical reasons: The more cooks, the worse it gets. Well, in the computer community it could be said "The more developers on a single project, the worse the product", and I find that a major issue when considering Microsoft and, actually, the Linux community reflects that fact pretty accurately. Theres a reason why the BEST games studios try to keep to a certain size.
Anders W - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway"
Having worked as a webmaster/webdesigner,with some projects having deadlines as short as 4 days from the day I got them, I can really say that no pure texteditor can compare to tools such as Dreamweaver and GoLive Cyberstudio. What WYSIWYG-editors do, is that they allow designers/artists to make the visual profile, instead of a "programmer". Having used both programs, I dont really see one as being superior over the other. Both have strengths and weaknessess, and complement each other. And now that Golive is being ported to Windows, one of the biggest drawbacks is being remedied. A port to Linux might be good, but since GIMP is not even close to being comparable to Photoshop, and there are no equivalent to ImageReady, I fail to see myself using Linux for that work. Besides, most webdesigners I know wont use Linux anyway, because its too clumsy and too technical for them. A more suited platform would be BeOS, since its more suited for Ease of Use and End-user power.
Anders W - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
Hmmmm, I think you would need something more than that kind of graphics-power....It requires a maxed-out Onyx2 Reality Monster to achieve 80MPolys/s...The Voodoo2-boards lose some performance while running SLI. BTW, we are talking at least 32-bit colour depth and at least 1024*768 when it comes to realism, right?
>practical rate possible; it is most certainly not an interpreted emulation like the running of a BASIC program.
Thats how games like Quake works, and the procedure for a final scanline or raytrace-render. When youre working in Maya for example, which I was talking about, modelling, animating and lighting a scene fully shaded and textured, its not very practical to work that way. You would lose all interactivity and workflow. In Maya and other 3D-programs, the scene is parsed in realtime, and rendered and output to the display. The same goes for hardware OpenGL-rendering. In a game, all calls to OpenGL or other appropriate API is already parsed and ready.
>Re. storing scene files in ASCII, the storage format makes no difference. Before rendering begins, the scene is loaded into memory and >translated into OpenGL primitives in native form. When rendering begins, no further translation is necessary.
Again, this assumes that it is a final render, or a game. I mean, when you are working on a scene in realtime, changing the dynamics settings for the entire scene during realtime shaded and textured playback of an animation in the perspective window requires realtime-parsing =)
>So, the software on a real workstation is nothing to sneeze at:).
Oh, I wouldnt know, I lost count on the number of hours Ive worked at a SGI-workstation sometime after passing 1100 hours =)
Which Playstation? PSX2 is not out yet, and the old one is slower than a P166 when it comes to cpu, and the Permedia-chip is faster than the PSXs hardware. The Visual PC is limited by its "slow" CPU, but its graphics-hardware is among the fastest on the PC-side. Only Intergraphs Wildcat is faster in theory, although I have yet to see that proved IRL. I take it you have never used an SGI-workstation. The Visual PC is faster than any Indy in existence...Ok, faster than any Indy workstation;) The difference between the Playstation and the workstation is that the Playstation works with compiled programs heavily optimized for the hardware, using assembler and C, while the workstation works with realtime modelling and graphics in a way similar to Java or uncompiled basic, in that the scene is actually a pure ASCII-file(Take a look at a PovRay-scene and you will see what I mean). Also, the Playstation doesnt use the same level of interactivity, resolution, anti-aliasing, colour depth etc etc ad infinitum.
I totally agree on this one. To further prove the point, I could also include a few more things: Those screenshots probably werent running on a 1280*1024 32-bit display. And a few good questions: Single- or double-sided polys? AA-levels? Amount of textures? What kind of lights? Resolution? Colour depth? What kind of hardware were they running it on?
Someone said they were manipulating the images in realtime, I would like to get that confirmed, and how they manipulated the scenes in that case. And how was the scenes setup? Were they they precompiled programs, with object controllers included, or were they a normal scene from a 3d-program?
Wow, you have it 100% confirmed?? When did you get hold of one? And why would one even think of outputting the display over the FireWire-interface(IEEE 1394)? Maybe for transferring DV to a DV-cam, or the other way around etc, but its absolutely a no-brainer to try and output a signal to the display through that bus. BTW, I take it you havent used a SGI system, right? Oh, silly me, if it took hours to do the things on that display, it was probably a Personal Iris Workstation, or something even older, such as one of the 68x-equipped machines they built in the beginning.
>and is usually set to 320x240. It has a color >depth of 16 bits, not 24.
Actually, a skilled programmer(Do they still exist?) can tweak the PSX to achive 400*300, and if he performs a complex ceremony, of which some ingredients are a tanker of Jolt, some Lego and a rubber chicken, he might actually squeeze out a 24-bit display.
>The pictures on that page are probably actual >size, given that televisions are terrible for >high quality display. There's not much reason to >above 320x240, and your colors will bleed so much >that 16 bit color depth looks fine.
Hey!! Dont go comparing the lousy NTSC-system(In European graphics- and video-circles NTSC stands for Never The Same Colour) with the actually usable PAL-system. PAL TVs can easily accomodate 720*576, many TVs can handle full D2 PAL, which is 768*576, compared to NTSC:s 640*480. PALs colour-definition is also infinitely more accurate than NTSCs. Also, PALs 25 fps, interlaced is smoother than NTSCs 30 fps, non-interlaced.
"Wwoowwe, a 96-bit display!!" Quote from a lamer I had in my class.
Linux is actually a lousy games platform, even compared to a "new" incomplete OS such as BeOS. The advantages BeOS has over Linux, when it comes to games, is that the graphics-handling is actually FAST and standardized, which goes for sound too. The GUI is more nicely integrated, with a higher performance and less memory overhead etc. In short, the OS is designed for High Performance media-handling, and nowadays you can include games in that category.
However, neither BeOS or Linux is suited for a games console, which is mostly bought by people who either buys it for their children, or whose interests only lies in gaming. Neither category would use the OS in itself. There are practical reasons for not using it as the consoles OS. How would you store it? On a flash-ROM? How large part of the OS are you going to include? If you use Linux, which graphics library will you use? Will you use X for the GUI(Theres no way you are going to get the majority of gamers to use a CLI)? Those are just a few questions that would arise. Its better to either use a homegrown OS, or one suited for embedded/realtime applications instead.
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>Posting exactly this kind of bullshit is what has pretty much made most of the remaining Amiga users the >laughing stock of the internet. One would've thought these guys would learned better than to do this by >now. Shrug. Guess some people never learn....
Its just like many Linux-rumours and Linux-users. Wake me when Linux gets real OpenGL-support, and simple installation of drivers for different devices. Last time I heard something, it was Real Soon Now...
Shinobi - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
"Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
Ive used Maya on both platforms, and with small scenes, the Intergraph rocks, but as soon as you get over a certain scene-size,in my case 45Mb, the Intergraph becomes SLLLOOOOOWWWW, while O2s and the new NT-machines just happily speeds along. And the SGIs have higher memory-bandwidth to the system-memory than the Wildcat 4000 has onboard. And its less cost-prohibitive to upgrade with more memory.
Shinobi - Champion of Lady weeanna, Inquisitor Cult of Jolt "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
I talked to Chris Scott a few months ago, and they said that a BeOS-version is more likely than a Linux-version. That might have changed by now, however. And thats what I would like.
Shinobi - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
"Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
If Maya was ported to BeOS, I would definitely want a BeOS-cluster. CPU-usage simply depends on the level of complexity of your scenes/movies/animations. Ive been working several thousand hours with 3d-graphics, compositing and video-editing on several different platforms, including SGI/Irix, NT(Intergraphs mostly), Macs, under Linux and BSD and BeOS, and I can testify that a 300Mhz P2 is NOT enough for high-end work in above-mentioned
fields. In mid-level work (A few thousand frames in 768*576) its quite easy to make 10 P2 Xeons to choke, and thats an optimized scene. Trust me, Im talking of my own experiences. With good programs for BeOS, and clustering-ability, BeOS could be a good contender, certainly better than Linux and *BSD because of their severe deficiencies in the graphics and computing-areas compared with BeOS. And I dont find BeOS proprietarity to be a problem. In fact, it seems to help rather than hinder in their case.
Shinobi - Inquisitor Cult of Jolt, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
Can we say "recode for LIntel"? Can we say "Needs a special X-server AND Windowmanager"? Sure, I knew you could...
And, when I talked with both tech-people and development-people at Alias|Wavefront(Having worked as a trainee for them has its advantages contact-wise), their answer was that they werent intending to develop Maya or any other tools for Linux, since it isnt as standardized and united as they want it. It would be more realistic for them to port Maya for BeOS for example.
Anders W - Inquisitor CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
Since the CPU in the PSX2 utilizes a MIPS-core, complete with the MIPS IV-instruction set, its actually designed and owned by a company from the USA.
Anders W - Inquisitor CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway"
Problem is, I finished school over a year ago, and I havent gotten any permanent job yet. My friends dont have room to have me living there etc.
I need the new computer to be able to work(Im the lead 3d-artist, and my parents dont want me to render on their machine). We have showed a demo here in Sweden. The problem is that the government doesnt give away grants for games development, and no company weve talked with has the nerve to invest in our project. I wont get a bank loan, since I dont have any money to back us...
Ive calculated that I need to work about 35 hours/week minimum to support myself. In short, me and my friends the programmers NEED to get paid for what we do.
MVH Anders W - Inquisitor CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway"
Ok, here I go. Some people here will flame me for this, but I find some of my experiences
Im currently involved in the development of a game currently on hold. The reason for it being on hold is that we cant afford to do it. Thats the true bottom line. We have spent thousands of hours on developing new algorithms for rendering, dynamics etc, just to get that little edge, on getting a good and thorough design, nice graphics, convincing sound-handling etc, all done in our spare time, when we were students at different schools here in Sweden. Some of our algorithms are more advanced and faster than some of IDs and 3D Realms, incredibly enough. Problem is, we dont want to release it open source, because of all the time weve spent on development on things that can be considered state-of-the-art. We dont want others to use OUR work, to achieve that status. Im out of school, unemployed, need to move away from my parents, and I need to get myself a new computer. Im waiting for answers from some companies. In the meantime, Im a poor guy who has to rely on my parents and friends to keep me fed and warm. Im constantly looking for a job. I dont have time or money to put into development, and I dont wanna give away thousands of hours of work just like that.
Another reason for keeping development proprietary is purely practical reasons: The more cooks, the worse it gets. Well, in the computer community it could be said "The more developers on a single project, the worse the product", and I find that a major issue when considering Microsoft and, actually, the Linux community reflects that fact pretty accurately. Theres a reason why the BEST games studios try to keep to a certain size.
Anders W - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway"
Having worked as a webmaster/webdesigner,with some projects having deadlines as short as 4 days from the day I got them, I can really say that no pure texteditor can compare to tools such as Dreamweaver and GoLive Cyberstudio. What WYSIWYG-editors do, is that they allow designers/artists to make the visual profile, instead of a "programmer". Having used both programs, I dont really see one as being superior over the other. Both have strengths and weaknessess, and complement each other. And now that Golive is being ported to Windows, one of the biggest drawbacks is being remedied. A port to Linux might be good, but since GIMP is not even close to being comparable to Photoshop, and there are no equivalent to ImageReady, I fail to see myself using Linux for that work. Besides, most webdesigners I know wont use Linux anyway, because its too clumsy and too technical for them. A more suited platform would be BeOS, since its more suited for Ease of Use and End-user power.
Anders W - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
Hmmmm, I think you would need something more than that kind of graphics-power....It requires a maxed-out Onyx2 Reality Monster to achieve 80MPolys/s...The Voodoo2-boards lose some performance while running SLI. BTW, we are talking at least 32-bit colour depth and at least 1024*768 when it comes to realism, right?
Werent they going to use a special "Media Processor", instead of the traditional CPU-design? But they might have changed their minds..
>practical rate possible; it is most certainly not an interpreted emulation like the running of a BASIC program.
:).
Thats how games like Quake works, and the procedure for a final scanline or raytrace-render. When youre working in Maya for example, which I was talking about, modelling, animating and lighting a scene fully shaded and textured, its not very practical to work that way. You would lose all interactivity and workflow. In Maya and other 3D-programs, the scene is parsed in realtime, and rendered and output to the display. The same goes for hardware OpenGL-rendering. In a game, all calls to OpenGL or other appropriate API is already parsed and ready.
>Re. storing scene files in ASCII, the storage format makes no difference. Before rendering begins, the scene is loaded into memory and
>translated into OpenGL primitives in native form. When rendering begins, no further translation is necessary.
Again, this assumes that it is a final render, or a game. I mean, when you are working on a scene in realtime, changing the dynamics settings for the entire scene during realtime shaded and textured playback of an animation in the perspective window requires realtime-parsing =)
>So, the software on a real workstation is nothing to sneeze at
Oh, I wouldnt know, I lost count on the number of hours Ive worked at a SGI-workstation sometime after passing 1100 hours =)
Which Playstation? PSX2 is not out yet, and the old one is slower than a P166 when it comes to cpu, and the Permedia-chip is faster than the PSXs hardware. The Visual PC is limited by its "slow" CPU, but its graphics-hardware is among the fastest on the PC-side. Only Intergraphs Wildcat is faster in theory, although I have yet to see that proved IRL. I take it you have never used an SGI-workstation. The Visual PC is faster than any Indy in existence...Ok, faster than any Indy workstation ;) The difference between the Playstation and the workstation is that the Playstation works with compiled programs heavily optimized for the hardware, using assembler and C, while the workstation works with realtime modelling and graphics in a way similar to Java or uncompiled basic, in that the scene is actually a pure ASCII-file(Take a look at a PovRay-scene and you will see what I mean). Also, the Playstation doesnt use the same level of interactivity, resolution, anti-aliasing, colour depth etc etc ad infinitum.
I totally agree on this one. To further prove the point, I could also include a few more things: Those screenshots probably werent running on a 1280*1024 32-bit display. And a few good questions: Single- or double-sided polys? AA-levels? Amount of textures? What kind of lights? Resolution? Colour depth? What kind of hardware were they running it on?
Someone said they were manipulating the images in realtime, I would like to get that confirmed, and how they manipulated the scenes in that case. And how was the scenes setup? Were they they precompiled programs, with object controllers included, or were they a normal scene from a 3d-program?
Wow, you have it 100% confirmed?? When did you get hold of one? And why would one even think of outputting the display over the FireWire-interface(IEEE 1394)? Maybe for transferring DV to a DV-cam, or the other way around etc, but its absolutely a no-brainer to try and output a signal to the display through that bus. BTW, I take it you havent used a SGI system, right? Oh, silly me, if it took hours to do the things on that display, it was probably a Personal Iris Workstation, or something even older, such as one of the 68x-equipped machines they built in the beginning.
Yes, I know, I just commented on the person who wanted Linux as the OS for the console, and for that purpose, its totally useless.
>and is usually set to 320x240. It has a color >depth of 16 bits, not 24.
Actually, a skilled programmer(Do they still exist?) can tweak the PSX to achive 400*300, and if he performs a complex ceremony, of which some ingredients are a tanker of Jolt, some Lego and a rubber chicken, he might actually squeeze out a 24-bit display.
>The pictures on that page are probably actual >size, given that televisions are terrible for >high quality display. There's not much reason to >above 320x240, and your colors will bleed so much >that 16 bit color depth looks fine.
Hey!! Dont go comparing the lousy NTSC-system(In European graphics- and video-circles NTSC stands for Never The Same Colour) with the actually usable PAL-system. PAL TVs can easily accomodate 720*576, many TVs can handle full D2 PAL, which is 768*576, compared to NTSC:s 640*480. PALs colour-definition is also infinitely more accurate than NTSCs. Also, PALs 25 fps, interlaced is smoother than NTSCs 30 fps, non-interlaced.
"Wwoowwe, a 96-bit display!!" Quote from a lamer I had in my class.
Linux is actually a lousy games platform, even compared to a "new" incomplete OS such as BeOS. The advantages BeOS has over Linux, when it comes to games, is that the graphics-handling is actually FAST and standardized, which goes for sound too. The GUI is more nicely integrated, with a higher performance and less memory overhead etc. In short, the OS is designed for High Performance media-handling, and nowadays you can include games in that category.
However, neither BeOS or Linux is suited for a games console, which is mostly bought by people who either buys it for their children, or whose interests only lies in gaming. Neither category would use the OS in itself. There are practical reasons for not using it as the consoles OS. How would you store it? On a flash-ROM? How large part of the OS are you going to include? If you use Linux, which graphics library will you use? Will you use X for the GUI(Theres no way you are going to get the majority of gamers to use a CLI)? Those are just a few questions that would arise. Its better to either use a homegrown OS, or one suited for embedded/realtime applications instead.