A bit of SGI nostalgia

[spacemonkey]

Was going through a box of old VHS tapes and found an SGI promo video for InfiniteReality. Thought you guys might get a kick out of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIy2cWQPc9c

I remember the first time I saw IR pumping out a 60Hz image - blew my mind

 

[flynn]

Yes, the Onyx was a beast. I remember some of the old Softimage videos where the operator was using one, then I would try to do the same with the humble Indigo^2 at work.

 

[Dade]

My "first" SGI was a Personal IRIS 35. It had a awesome 21" CRT monitor with a weight of not less than 45Kg

Anyone remember their FlyButton application to run through their collection of demos ?

Than I worked with a 440VGXT (a huge cabinet with a 3Kwatt dedicated power line ).

At the time I had access to a Onyx RE2, I had already a 3Dfx Voodoo at home ... the future were not looking bright for them

 

[Simon F]

Yes, the Onyx was a beast. I remember some of the old Softimage videos where the operator was using one, then I would try to do the same with the humble Indigo^2 at work.

We had an indigo in the office for a long time - for years it was the only machine we had that could play back, full rate, uncompressed RGB videos of hardware simulations.

 

[Davros]

so how did the onyx compare to pc gfx cards around at the time ?

 

[Simon F]

so how did the onyx compare to pc gfx cards around at the time ?

A 1996 Infinite reality VS a contemporary PC graphics card? You'd need a floating point compare.

In some senses, I think it still is astonishing:

710 million textured antialiased pixels filled per second

...and enough framebuffer memory to allocate 512 bits per pixel to a 1280x1024 framebuffer.

 

[flynn]

We had an indigo in the office for a long time - for years it was the only machine we had that could play back, full rate, uncompressed RGB videos of hardware simulations.

I love the Indigo. I've been wanting to add one to my collection for years but they are hard to come by in Europe, at least for a reasonable price.

I still use my Fuel from time to time when I want to do some animation in Softimage|3D.

 

[Simon F]

I love the Indigo. I've been wanting to add one to my collection for years but they are hard to come by in Europe, at least for a reasonable price.

You could have had ours for free -
sadly it went into the great electronic recycling bin in the sky a few years ago

 

[spacemonkey]

from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniteReality)

Capabilities and performance

The InfiniteReality was capable of several advanced capabilities:

    * 8 by 8 multi-sampled anti-aliasing[5]
    * A maximum color depth of 48-bit RGBA[5]
    * 16 overlay planes[5]
    * A 24-bit floating point Z-buffer[5]
    * Each pixel consists of 256 to 1,048 bits of data
    * Stereo viewing was supported and was quad buffered

The InfiniteReality's performance was:

    * 11 million non-lighted, depth-buffered, anti-aliased, triangle strips (40 pixels each) per second
    * 8.3 million textured, depth-buffered, anti-aliased, triangle strips (50 pixels each) per second
    * 7+ million lighted, textured and anti-aliased triangles per second
    * 800 million trilinear mip-mapped, textured, 16-bit texel, depth buffered pixels per second
    * 750 million trilinear mip-mapped, textured, 16-bit texel, four by four sub-sample anti-aliased, depth buffered pixels per second
    * 710+ million textured and anti-aliased pixels per second
    * 300 million displayed pixels per second, distributed over one to eight outputs

By comparison - back in 1995 my "ATI Mach 64" could accelerate the Windows GUI like nobody's business

 

[Davros]

back in 96 i had a voodoo card and it rocked...

 

[Davros]

found this bit of blub regarding the B10 Dynamic Pictures V192 chip

"* The V192 has application-level graphics performance comparable to SGI's Indigo2/Extreme and the HP Visualizer 24 at a fraction of the price."

 

[flynn]

found this bit of blub regarding the B10 Dynamic Pictures V192 chip

"* The V192 has application-level graphics performance comparable to SGI's Indigo2/Extreme and the HP Visualizer 24 at a fraction of the price."

The Extreme graphics did not support hardware texturing, the real deal was the MaxImpact with the back then ridiculously expensive 4MB texture memory.

I'd like to see how well did that claim stand but back then most of the cool software (Avid, Softimage, Alias) only ran on SGI systems, so you cannot really compare. Maybe some Viewperf results could show the performance of both systems.

 

[Davros]

or maybe there was a version of glquake for sgi machines i'm sure there was