CompuServe Messages

John, Good point about SGI's hardware shading. I saw one of their Onyx machines doing a nice textured fly-through of a small town at the Spring NCGA, but for high-end software rendering (Renderman etc) you need the kind of fast CPU math performance that the R4000, R4400 (and Alpha) provide. Obviously for realtime simulations you'd get something with a bunch of reality engines, not an Alpha. One interesting note though: At the PC expo last week in NY I saw Matrox's MGA card demo. It does realtime shading whithin AutoCAD and was very impressive. Seemed to be at about the same level as a low end Indigo, and it's supposed to be compatible with the DEC AXP. I'm coming at this from the point of view of someone looking for the fastest, most cost effective, CAD & rendering platform. DOS compatibility is important for a lot of people, but I'd rather have a machine who's hardware wasnt compromised by such compatibility. I see NT machines (based on the Alpha, R4000, etc) as being the bridge between PCs and workstations. They will have the speed, but the large market will allow for much lower prices. I sure hope NT doesnt turn out to be a dud!!! Charles P.S. I probably shouldnt have called this thread "Alpha VS. Pentium". I really just wanted to start a discussion about the Pentium, NT, and the new breed of PC/workstation hybrids. I do find it interesting, though, that while the Pentium is being heralded as the next great chip, DEC and MIPS both have much faster chips that should run much of the same software once NT is established.