From: dgoldman@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Daniel Robert Goldman)
Subject: Re: No more movies?
Organization: CS Department, Stanford University, California, USA
Date: 15 Oct 92 18:22:56 GMT

alumni106@camins.camosun.bc.ca (Max Sterling) writes:

>In article <pzjpnm+@lynx.unm.edu>, pklinker@apollo.mcl.bdm.com (Paul Klinker) writes:
>> I remember reading in U.S. News and World Report (the issue came out some
>> time in mid 1991) that Lucas was waiting for computer graphics technololgy
>> to improve before he made the new movies.  The article this was written in

>Well, in THAT case, he doesn't have to wait any longer. All he has to do 
>is come on down and buy a Silicon Graphics workstation, which is the 
>same system that they used for the special effects in Terminator 2. 

Well, since ILM has plenty of them, he already has!

>They're getting so ridiculously AFFORDABLE now, that the low end system 
>is about to enter the home computer market. It's got 30 bit colour 
>capability on screen, with an extra 10 bits used for layering effects, 
>it can draw 300,000 polygons/second, and thanks to the fact that it has 

The top of the line model can do these things, but those are still in the 
$200,000 range, last time I heard.

>commands for ray tracing BUILT RIGHT INTO THE HARDWARE, it can do full 
>screen ray tracing on the fly IN REAL TIME, and it's able to process at 

This is not true.  The SGI machines do some nice stuff, but not real-time
raytracing.  Some of the things they do in hardware are:  Gouraud shading
with multiple light sources, texturing, and NURBS, but not bump mapping,
displacement mapping, or ray tracing.

>about 100,000 TIMES the speed of a Mac QUADRA! After seeing it (and the 
>Mac Quadra) in action, I can believe it. Supposedly, it runs at 100 
>times the speed of a Mac Quadra, and it can process 1000 instructions 
>SIMILTANEOUSLY, ALL WITH 1 PROCESSOR! It's also upgradeable to EIGHT. 

This is also incorrect.  For hardware-assisted graphics instructions, a 
Crimson MIGHT be somewhere on that order of magnitude faster than a Quadra, 
but probably closer to only 10-100x for non-hardware assisted stuff (like
bump-mapping, displacement-mapping, and raytracing!).  And 1000 simultaneous 
instructions on one processor?  I'd love to see that!  I think what you're
referring to is the fact that graphics instructions are pipelined, which means
that several different graphics instructions can be at various stages of ex-
ecution at one time.  I doubt that more than 10 instructions could ever be in
the pipeline at one time.  Again, only the top of the line machines can handle 
8 processors (the next generation will handle 16)

>The base system also comes with 20 MEGS of RAM, and a 1 GIGABYTE hard 
>drive. All that can be had for $8,300 CANADIAN. So, do you think that'll 

That sounds like the price of the Indigo, which has NO graphics hardware, and
so most of the above is not true for that model.

On the other hand, the SGI's are without question the sweetest computers ever
made, IMHO, and are only getting better.  I have no doubt that if another
SW movie were to rely heavily on Computer Graphics, SGI's will be used in at
least some capacity!
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.starwars