any videos of SGI Ultimate Vision in action?

[Megadrive1988]

was wondering if anyone knows if there is any demo footage of SGI's Ultimate Vision systems in action, which are powered by parallel ATI VPUs. these systems should have been on the market for at least a little while now but havent seen a thing on them other than the press releases and basic info on SGI.com thanks in advance.

 

[MasterBaiter]

http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/onyx4/

That's all there is AFAIK. They did have a showing of them @ SIGGRAPH, but I didn't make it.

-edit- the Prism was announced just the other day btw.. anyone got $30k hiding behind their couch's pillows for this? http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2004/october/linux_vis.html

 

[Megadrive1988]

http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/onyx4/overview.html

For example, techniques using programmable shading for dynamic shadows, highly realistic materials, and self-animating objects make real-time cinematic-quality scenes feasible.

I'd like to see that myself. I'd like to see how close one these SGI mega-systems can approach cinematic/CG.

I don't think nextgen consoles or PCs even with SLI, will touch 32 tightly coupled R3xx graphics processors combined with "unique SGI® high-bandwidth, scalable, shared-memory architecture" anytime soon.

 

[Dave Baumann]

That's all there is AFAIK. They did have a showing of them @ SIGGRAPH, but I didn't make it.

Someone was telling me that they had a reather neat demo of the different modes of AA they can get with the board where they took an image and tiled it up with different levels of AA on the various tiles.

 

[MasterBaiter]

@ $30k a pop, they better be able to cook me dinner and shoot sparks out of their arse as well (with AA turned on to boot)!

We actually converted from SGI to PC last year due to the cost of the these badboys. I think the military is the primary buyer of SGI's these days. I still have a half a dozen O2's hanging out in the janitors closet. We still actually use a dual processor Origin 300 that has a 5 drive fibre vault. I think the thing set us back about $35k.

 

[KimB]

-edit- the Prism was announced just the other day btw.. anyone got $30k hiding behind their couch's pillows for this? http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2004/october/linux_vis.html

Yeah, um, a Linux system with ATI graphics? No thanks....

 

[Dave Baumann]

It's SGI's software layer.

 

[MasterBaiter]

SGI's bread & butter is Unix based the last time I checked. Last version of Irix I ran was 6.5.15 so it's been a spell. All I can say it that SGI's OS is very slick (and proprietary, much like their hardware).


Oi! I found some vid's for the Prizm!
http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/prism/streaming_video.html

 

[Althornin]

-edit- the Prism was announced just the other day btw.. anyone got $30k hiding behind their couch's pillows for this? http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2004/october/linux_vis.html

Yeah, um, a Linux system with ATI graphics? No thanks....

 

[nutball]

SGI's bread & butter is Unix based the last time I checked.

That has been the case historically, but I have quite regular contact with SGI guys and it seems that this may genuinely be changing, they do seem to be taking Linux pretty seriously as their future OS (at least in HPC markets).