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PMJI, but reality engines are less than $100,000, list on the Crimson reality engine is $99,900 and discounts are available. That gives you 192 bits of color, 32 bits Z bufffered. It displays over 1 million polygons per second with hardware anti-aliasing and texture mapping. The Onyx/2 RE2 is the next step up in the reality engine series and list for $159,900. It provides over 2 million shaded points, lines, and polygons per second. These figures are low because they're based on the R4000 not the R4400, and the new T series will blow away the R4400. You should also keep in mind that the performance of these machines is based on screen rendering not processor rendering. The geometry engines handle the graphics and produce phenomenal displays for simulation and real time visualization, however when it comes to old fashioned rendering to disk so that you can dump frame by frame to tape, the geometry engines become relatively useless, and you're stuck with rendering on a single R4400 processor at the moment. Additionally almost all of the SGI based rendering packages only support single CPU's in their rendering pipeline. Softimage at $50,000 per seat becomes expensive when you put it on 5-10 machines. Anyone interested in the move to SGI should focus on the Indigo2 with the Extreme Graphics. The performance is great and actual rendering speed to disk is the same as the performance on the larger micros, i.e. Crimsons and Onyx systems. On a more possitive note Softimage is about to release a multi-processor rendering package designed by a team out of Berlin. It should finally make use of the multi-processor configuration of the larger Micros. I believe the ship date is around January 1994. We have thoroughly tested all of the above mentioned hardware and regularly benchmark various SGI based animation packages.