From: grege@chopin.asd.sgi.com (Greg Estes)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.animation
Subject: Re: Amiga Power (Was RE: Babylon 5)
Date: 25 Jan 93 19:22:05 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: chopin.asd.sgi.com

In article <1993Jan24.133854.21680@netcom.com>, mnemonic@netcom.com (Rev Lebaredian) writes:
|> 
|>   If you are interested in using the Amiga for 3D animation, take a look
|> at DMIs Vivid 24 board.  Fully populated(four TI34020s), DMI claims it
|> can render 100,000 gourard shaded polygons per second and give you
|> 160 mflops of raw power.  This is compared to 70 mflops on a $200,000
|> SGI.  A fully populated Vivid with a amiga 3000 and an 040 board(for some
|> mips) comes in at about $12,000.  Not to mention that it also gives
|> 2048x2048x24(1280x1024x24 non-interlaced).
|> 
|>   It is supposed to be fully supported by Real3D v2.0($599) which should
|> be coming out in a month or two.
|> 
|>   You could concievably network 10 Amigas each with a Vivid24 and 040
|> to get 1600 Mflos (1.6 GFLOPS!) for about $120,000.  When compared to 
|> an equivolent SGI setup, it seems many times more cost efective.

Lord, how I hate "my platform is better than your platform" but...

These statements about "a $200,000 SGI" having 70 MFLOPS and 10 Amigas
having 1600 MFLOPS for $120,000 are just, shall we say, inaccurate.

You are comparing the rated CPU power of an 8-processor R3000-based SGI to
the raw MFLOPS rating of a Vivid24 and four 34020s. Let's not mix and
match the graphics vs. the cpu capability. If you want to talk about
graphics:

A $100K (not $200K) RealityEngine has 800MFLOPS of processing power in the
Geometry Engines alone. This is *in addition* to the CPU capability
of the system and the processing done in the Raster Manager (frame buffer)
boards. The Geometry Engines are used for polygon transformations
and image processing and are designed to work for *interactive* graphics,
not for non-real-time rendering of frames. An 8 GE Crimson RealityEngine
will process 600,000 textured, anti-aliased polygons/second, which may or
may not be enough for your application, but no one is going on-air with
100,000 shaded (not textured and not anti-aliased) polygons for any thing
like Babylon5, I would assume. The Crimson RealityEngine can process 1.1M
shaded polygons, btw.

If you want to compare off-line rendering, line up some ~$15K Indigo R4000s
or an SGI server and a number of Amigas in the same price range and see what happens. 
Then make a decision based around what makes sense for your application.
Sometimes an Amiga will make more sense, sometimes not. Any sensible person
who doesn't live in comp.amiga.advocacy.only land will know that.

There's also a whole boat-load of other things one can do with an advanced
graphics system that one cannot do on any number of souped-up amigas on
a network; the stereo, texture-mapping, real-time anti-aliasing, image
processing, high-def display and other capabilities of RealityEngine don't 
come by stringing a bunch of *any* brand of computer together.

My point is that it's not $200K Silicon Graphics systems that should be
the comparison point. The better question (as some netters have stated)
is "does it make sense to string together a bunch of Amigas vs. having
a smaller number of faster CPUs (like SGI, HP, IBM, DEC, Sun or even
Cray or Convex for that matter) for rendering frames of animation?" (or
whatever you're doing). There's a big difference in performance of a
symmetric multi-processing system like SGIs vs. a lot of boxes on the
net. 

One last thing; I think Amigas are great. I think they are really great
when equipped with a Video Toaster. I don't see why anyone would need to
compare it with a high-end SGI unit. They do different things for different
markets. Indigo vs. Amiga is a much more interesting discussion than Amigas
vs. $200K SGI.

Greg Estes
Silicon Graphics
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.animation