From: mark@calvin..westford.ccur.com (Mark Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Subject: Re: Real Time 24 bit Anim Playback
Date: 24 Jul 92 16:17:01 GMT
Article-I.D.: westford.1992Jul24.161701.3197
Organization: Concurrent Computer Corp. Westford MA.

In article <1992Jul24.035449.12512@lobo.rmhs.colorado.edu> jkrutz@lobo.rmhs.colorado.edu (Jamie Krutz) writes:
>Attention Mark Thompson:
>You mentioned a graphics board which you are involved in producing in your 
>message about SIGGRAPH.  You mentioned real time playback of 24 bit anims.
>So...what's the x/y resolution?  30fps really?  from a hard drive?  how much 
>will it cost?  what amigas does it work with?  when will it be available?

...warning.....somewhat commercial in nature.......

The product I mentioned really has nothing to do with the Amiga, I just did
the demos loops for it with LightWave. It is a 6U VME board(s) that go into
Concurrent real-time unix platforms. There has been talk about releasing them
for other systems but that is a marketing issue. In any event, they are i860
based, have a resolution of 1280 x 1024, and are avaible in 8 and 24 bit
versions. The X11 server runs directly on the board and does VME bus mastered
DMA to offload the host in a big way. Up to 8 of them can run on a single host
without too much performance degredation. Besides being real X11 screamers,
there greatest strength is image load speed. An 8bit 768 x 480 uncompressed
image loop can easily run at approximately 50fps. I have not actually measured
the 24bit rate yet because there is a bug in the code that is parsing and
displaying my 24bit IFFs. The goal is to hit 30fps but we may miss that by a
small margin...we believe there is still room for some optimization. The image
transfers take place over the VME bus out of host/system memory and present
nearlly no load to the host. Similarly, X performance remains very good while
running animations. The board is called the GA5000 and I will be bringing my
own 24bit card set to the show for the exhibition. On it will be a variety of
my demo anims which some of you may have seen....The Toy Room, Backyard Pool,
F15 over Kings Canyon, the morph of my wife, and a couple test runs from my
latest animation project which features some very nice rain sequences. I
designed the ASICs on this board but my cohort here actually did the overall
board design. As for price, it would be best to talk to Concurrent sales and
marketing, but suffice it to say that it is out of the average Amiga owners
budget (in the $10K area).

We will also be showing an unannounced 3D product developed with a partnership
with Du Pont Pixel. It uses 4 i860s and is aimed at GL (SGI) applications.
This board is the GA6400 and is one of the products I am in charge of
developing.
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