CompuServe Messages

Thats a good question that I hope the Autodesk people will help us find out (y'all jus jump here anytime). The knowledgeable people tell me that Renderman doesn't use OpenGL to help acceleration. So assuming (a dangerous thing) that the MAX render engine (Hoops thing) also is not OpenGL dependent, then the processor only will determine final render speed. It appears the Renderman is the standard against what everything else is compared to. I sense that MAX is aiming toward the high end to compete with Alias and the other big packages. So would I think the MAX render engine would be more like Renderman and not offload any rendering to the OpenGL engine. Alan Iglesias and Martin Foster think the OpenGL subsystem is more geared toward realtime applications such as simulations and games. So while I got excited and the SGI demo I went to where they rendered in realtime, it must not have been final output but only preview. However, SGI is putting and lot of effort into improving the video subsystems. This must be for the simulation customers. I think the answer to your question is this: If you are running rendering on a network, then the slave machines can use standard video cards. The modeling and master machines need a OpenGL card to take advantage of the render preview modes and the acceleration available under Win NT. However the other thing to think about is what price are OpenGL cards gonna be? If they are low then you might as well put then in all your machines that run Win NT. I think this is going to happen. I'm already getting a lot of vendors calling and sending me info on OpenGL and GLint cards. Later…