CompuServe Messages

Charles, You're right about ray tracing and the other high quality renders — fast CPU/FPU's are needed. In a real world environment your going to need all those other little utility programs you use every day too though… CB> I sure hope NT doesnt turn out to be a dud!!! From a technical standpoint, anything based on the Windows paradigm has to be <grin>! (I wonder about a system that's best selling products are sceen savers and wallpaper! Is that what it's best for?) Marketing and market success is another thing though. I don't have too much hope for all the cross-platform promises. Note that the demo they were running wasn't running the processor's native code — it was the exact same package you can buy off the shelf for Windows. They picked the class of program that works well under those circumstances. Renderman would have choked. Over the next 3 years I'm pretty sure you'll continue to see what we have now. Large numbers of PC's based on DOS and the 80×86 architecture. and a small number of workstations based on the Alpha, R4400, etc. and their decendents. Farther out into the future things may change, but that's too far to predict in the computing world! John.