CompuServe Messages

Thanks for the help as I can see that I still have a lot to learn. At least I can talk about this stuff without putting my foot (both feet?) in my mouth. Question: We know that 3DS cannot do raytracing (except for shadows) in its present form without a add-on module yet it produces good results. However it must not be THAT good since only recently has it been used in films. Its been a video tool. No raytracer. Given that I have no knowledge of the SGI hardware architecture (Duh! does it show?) I assume from your letters and my reading that the OpenGL hardware is designed to produce fast realtime rendering by offloading the rendering to the OpenGL hardware. This allows the processor to devote clock cycles to "normal" duties such as disk i/o and such. Now while the OpenGL rendering is great for games and flight simulation, its not good enought for final rendering at film quality (which you must be doing) or even D1 or Beta video since you need the raytracer. For production quality work then the raytracying engine must be involked and rendering time then goes through the roof. This new SGI video card set uses dual data pipelines which has helped the data throughput substantially. And the next video card set is going to be better blah blah blah. But they have improved the OpenGL system which doesn't address the raytracing rendering which is a function of the CPU only. This is why the SGI people are waiting for the Mips 10000 series processor I assume. So what your saying is even though the realtime output is good, we're not viewing final output in realtime. The raytracing engine therefore is accessing only the processor and not the OpenGL subsystem. So for the moment OpenGL is a Phong or Gouraud shading engine only. This must be the reason people are more concerned with packing 4 or even 6 Pentiums or P6s, or even multiple Alpha chips, in a box and not so much on the video subsystem. But since people are using 3DS with the Phong shader to produce commercials, isn't the OpenGL engine good enough for Phong shaded commercials also? The output I need is only S-video, not even Beta. I'm just producing VHS tapes and CD-ROMs with Authorware. I trying to get that First Job (outside the office) and will be buying Beta SP equipment in the near future (hitting the auctions right now). Waiting for your opinions…