CompuServe Thread

To the Yost Group or anyone who understands the inner workings of 3D-Studio's renderer: I have recently come in contact with a digital imaging company who has just released a new expansion board for the PC platform. It acts as a co- processor to the main processor. The board can contain up to 64 parallel processors which can accomplish 2.56 billion (yes that is "BILLION") MAC's, Multiply-accumulates, per second. It was mainly designed for high-powered digital imaging tasks such as those found in the fields of medical and satellite image processing. The company provides the board, the chip architecture, and Assembly and C language programming extensions. This means that it is up to us to design applications which can utilize the board's power. The 16 processor version of the card, according to their promotional material, costs under $3,000.00, which would seem to be in a price range affordable to most 3D-Studio users (especially if it could speed up rendering times like I think it could). MY QUESTION: Can 3D-Studio's renderer be instructed to pass rendering tasks to this ISA expansion board, or is there a way to write an IPAS routine to do this, or would it require a rewritten version of the render engine? Someone please address this issue! It seems that this board could possibly revolutionize the way we use 3D-Studio. For, rather than buying an SGI machine for $10k to $250k to achieve faster rendering times, we might be able to buy this card and some application package or add-on for $3k to $10k and be rendering faster than an SGI. I'll be eagerly awaiting any reply!