This post is full of inaccuracies. It is clear that this post is either a troll or the poster has never done significant development under either D3D or OpenGL.
Most people's applications don't show advantages on high end SGI hardware.
But you would agree that a number of features available on SGIs would be useful, no? (I listed some on my wish list elsewhere in this discussion... like higher color depth in the pixel/texel pipeline, etc...)
I've always liked SGIs for the featureset more than the performance. Even an SGI maximum impact (which barely accelerated texturing) was more useful than a Voodoo2 (which was the PC3D I had at the time). Similarly, an O2 has features that would be great on a GeForce based card like the media buffer. However, my TNT2 based PC can outperform my O2 on a number of applications that I use everyday.
Most PC3D is designed toward the boxcopy and the software side of the IHVs solution is lost in marketing somewhere.
Getting closer in speed, but not really in featureset.
There are a number of features that SGIs have that would be very useful:
* Higher resolution color depth. i.e. >8 bits per component. * Better support for more (or less) than 3 or 4 components per pixel. (luminance, luminance-alpha, 16bit alpha, etc...) * Full support for the GL pixel pipeline. * Full support for GL 1.2 imaging extensions. * Better stress/framerate scalability. Part of this is a software issue, part of it is a hardware issue. * Better support for performance profiling registers. * Better support for multi-buffer and multi-pipe rendering. * Better digital video support (the SGI media buffer).
The point is that SGI wasn't just good at fast graphics hardware, they were good at fast, feature complete graphics systems. PC 3D people haven't figured that out because they were too busy letting someone else (OGLARB or MSD3D) innovate the hardware-software interface. I hope that someone in the PC 3D industry steps up an actually innovates on the software/interface side of things. NVIDIA is starting to do this, but they still don't have it down quite yet. Maybe the SGI/NVIDIA settlement will help this out.
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This post is full of inaccuracies. It is clear that this post is either a troll or the poster has never done significant development under either D3D or OpenGL.
But you would agree that a number of features available on SGIs would be useful, no? (I listed some on my wish list elsewhere in this discussion... like higher color depth in the pixel/texel pipeline, etc...)
I've always liked SGIs for the featureset more than the performance. Even an SGI maximum impact (which barely accelerated texturing) was more useful than a Voodoo2 (which was the PC3D I had at the time). Similarly, an O2 has features that would be great on a GeForce based card like the media buffer. However, my TNT2 based PC can outperform my O2 on a number of applications that I use everyday.
Most PC3D is designed toward the boxcopy and the software side of the IHVs solution is lost in marketing somewhere.
Getting closer in speed, but not really in featureset.
There are a number of features that SGIs have that would be very useful:
* Higher resolution color depth. i.e. >8 bits per component.
* Better support for more (or less) than 3 or 4 components per pixel. (luminance, luminance-alpha, 16bit alpha, etc...)
* Full support for the GL pixel pipeline.
* Full support for GL 1.2 imaging extensions.
* Better stress/framerate scalability. Part of this is a software issue, part of it is a hardware issue.
* Better support for performance profiling registers.
* Better support for multi-buffer and multi-pipe rendering.
* Better digital video support (the SGI media buffer).
The point is that SGI wasn't just good at fast graphics hardware, they were good at fast, feature complete graphics systems. PC 3D people haven't figured that out because they were too busy letting someone else (OGLARB or MSD3D) innovate the hardware-software interface. I hope that someone in the PC 3D industry steps up an actually innovates on the software/interface side of things. NVIDIA is starting to do this, but they still don't have it down quite yet. Maybe the SGI/NVIDIA settlement will help this out.