This recent string of announcements seems funny to me. When I think of SGI, I think of the company that brought us Open GL and high-powered graphics oriented computers. All any of these articles are talking about is servers and what operating systems they are running. Big deal. Companys that make servers are a dime a dozen. I want to know what they are going to do to make Linux a serious graphics platform. There is a lot of talk on this subject now (things that will appear), but Pixar and ILM aren't going to buy SGI Linux boxes if they can't do anything with them. Support for there proprietary graphics hardware under Linux and some serious 3D modeling software that takes advantage of it is what SGI needs, not strategy shifts and new names for there server lines.
I think that saying the point of a 3D accelerator is to "offload the need for a high end processor" is a bit of a mis-statement. I don't think there is a PC on the market yet that can even play Quake 1 in OpenGL mode at 640x480 at more than 1 fps if software rendering is used. The point of a 3D accelerator is to get speed and quality that would be entirely impossible without one, not to ease the burden on your CPU, or to save you the trouble of getting a new one.
I'm no 3Dfx zealot, but is there any 3D support whatsoever for the G400 in Linux? If there isn't (I don't think there is) then buying a G400 means buying a high-priced 2D board and wasting most of the hardware it contains, and a lot of your own money. Unless you are talking about using the G400 under windows, in which case, what does it have to do with this discussion?
Re:BWP did NOT invent this.
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Lo-Tech Cinema
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This seems to set up a function of film quality that is inversely proportional to budget.
f(10k) = Clerks (spectacular) f(6Mill) = Mallrats (crap with some bright spots) f(25k) = Chasing Amy (very good, but not on par with Clerks.)
3Dfx are being stupid with the Glide emulation (wrapper) thing. However, this announcement is still good news for those of who _own_ a Banshee or Voodoo3. I bought a banshee when I built my Linux box, because I saw it had drivers, and the NVidia drivers are "development only", and not really fast enough for games. (At least with a TNT. With a TNT2, it is probably playable.) Now that I have a banshee, I'm finding out that the Banshee drivers are pretty iffy and crash-prone. I can pull my TNT out of my other box, and use it in Linux, but then I get horrid 3D performance. I'm hoping that this announcement means my banshee will have good 2D and 3D support sometime in the near future.
I've got a BP6 as well and I actually (sorry) originally intended to install NT on it and put Linux on my PII. Unfortunately, (maybe) I couldn't even get NT to install on this machine, so I put Linux on it, w/o using the ATA66 support (I plugged my fancy ATA/66 HD into a standard IDE controller, what a waste.) However, what is this issue with pset? I don't even know what pset is. Also, where did you get ATA/66 support? It would be really nice to have that working, as it yields a nice performance boost. Are there plans to include it in the next kernel release?
It may not be totally on topic, but when is the new SGI file system (XFS) going to be available, and will it mean that I won't have a horribly corrupted hard drive every time my banshee drivers crash?
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Ok. Good point.
When can I get it?
This recent string of announcements seems funny to me. When I think of SGI, I think of the company that brought us Open GL and high-powered graphics oriented computers. All any of these articles are talking about is servers and what operating systems they are running. Big deal. Companys that make servers are a dime a dozen. I want to know what they are going to do to make Linux a serious graphics platform. There is a lot of talk on this subject now (things that will appear), but Pixar and ILM aren't going to buy SGI Linux boxes if they can't do anything with them. Support for there proprietary graphics hardware under Linux and some serious 3D modeling software that takes advantage of it is what SGI needs, not strategy shifts and new names for there server lines.
I think that saying the point of a 3D accelerator is to "offload the need for a high end processor" is a bit of a mis-statement. I don't think there is a PC on the market yet that can even play Quake 1 in OpenGL mode at 640x480 at more than 1 fps if software rendering is used. The point of a 3D accelerator is to get speed and quality that would be entirely impossible without one, not to ease the burden on your CPU, or to save you the trouble of getting a new one.
I'm no 3Dfx zealot, but is there any 3D support whatsoever for the G400 in Linux? If there isn't (I don't think there is) then buying a G400 means buying a high-priced 2D board and wasting most of the hardware it contains, and a lot of your own money. Unless you are talking about using the G400 under windows, in which case, what does it have to do with this discussion?
This seems to set up a function of film quality that is inversely proportional to budget.
f(10k) = Clerks (spectacular)
f(6Mill) = Mallrats (crap with some bright spots)
f(25k) = Chasing Amy (very good, but not on par with Clerks.)
Thank you. I couldn't agree more.
3Dfx are being stupid with the Glide emulation (wrapper) thing. However, this announcement is still good news for those of who _own_ a Banshee or Voodoo3. I bought a banshee when I built my Linux box, because I saw it had drivers, and the NVidia drivers are "development only", and not really fast enough for games. (At least with a TNT. With a TNT2, it is probably playable.)
Now that I have a banshee, I'm finding out that the Banshee drivers are pretty iffy and crash-prone. I can pull my TNT out of my other box, and use it in Linux, but then I get horrid 3D performance.
I'm hoping that this announcement means my banshee will have good 2D and 3D support sometime in the near future.
Then I tied her to a chair and I shaved off all her hair and I left her in the desert all alone
I've got a BP6 as well and I actually (sorry) originally intended to install NT on it and put Linux on my PII. Unfortunately, (maybe) I couldn't even get NT to install on this machine, so I put Linux on it, w/o using the ATA66 support (I plugged my fancy ATA/66 HD into a standard IDE controller, what a waste.) However, what is this issue with pset? I don't even know what pset is. Also, where did you get ATA/66 support? It would be really nice to have that working, as it yields a nice performance boost. Are there plans to include it in the next kernel release?
It may not be totally on topic, but when is the new SGI file system (XFS) going to be available, and will it mean that I won't have a horribly corrupted hard drive every time my banshee drivers crash?
How about: Super Monkey Collider Loses Funding - This could almost be a \. headline.