#SGI and NewTek
5 messages in this thread
Ok, folks. Saw the SGI show the other day. $4995 price point is a hoax. Every
SGI guy/gal I talked to recommended a minimum of 64megs as a realistic
animation and video start-point. That alone will set you back a cool $6000!
Hard drive is also extra, lots extra. Look for a basic ani/video machine
setting you back $12,000. BUT… that's half the price we were talking about 2
years ago with the Indigo! Things are gonna get interesting in '95-96!
Did anyone catch the really cool news from NewTek!? They unveiled a new box…
The Toaster Screamer. It is a 3D rendering engine for their Video Toaster and
Lightwave software. Get this:
* 4 parallel MIPS R4400 64bit 150MHZ RISC processors!!!!!!!!!
* Program memory expandable to 1 GIG
They are claiming 600+ MIPS performance from this ROCKET. Price point?
$10,000. WOW. Can you say BRUTE FORCE?
Dan
Note that the Newtek box still requires an Amiga… I'll be curious to see how
robustly they get that working under AmigaDOS.
– G
This is very true. It does all go back to connectivity and, as you say,
robust(ness/ivity). <G> An excellent idea, though. I would like to have a
couple of R4400s under the hood of a dedicated 3ds render engine! How bout it?
You could call it…. Farm in a Box. Or how about the Autodesk RFF Rendering
Engine (RFF for Real Freaking Fast, of course <G>).
Dan
p.s.- 3dsr3 sounds wonderful. What sys reqs are going to be attached?
The integrated network rendering in R3 does pretty much the same thing…
especially since 486/66 motherboards have gone down in price.
– G
PS: Sys reqs?
Actually, the Screamer is running WinNT. I think the one they demo'd was quite
preliminary. They simply ported the renderer part of LightWave, not the
interface, so the gizmo is good for accelerating renderings, but does nothing
for the interface (editor, scene composition, etc) on the Amiga side. The demo
used TCP/IP to simply copy files from machine to machine, not unlike the
networked rendering in 3DSr3.
I think NewTek made it to keep the Hollywood types happy. They promised an
accelerator many months ago, but it never appeared. And unless the renderer is
seriously reorganized to take full advantage of the parallelism of the four
processor, I think they'll simply have each working on its own frame, or
working on a quadrant of a single frame.
Even a single 4400 would make more sense for most people who just want a little
extra oomph in rendering times. It might even be cheaper than the souped-up
Amiga 2000 / Toaster combo. 🙂