From: alumni106@camins.camosun.bc.ca (Max Sterling)
Subject: Re: No more movies?
Organization: Camosun College
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 10:37:28 GMT

In article <dgoldman.719173376@Xenon.Stanford.EDU>, dgoldman@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Daniel Robert Goldman) writes:
> alumni106@camins.camosun.bc.ca (Max Sterling) writes:

>>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.
[cut]
> 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.
[cut]
>>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.

Well, I SAW the INDIGO model no more than a week ago, and it WAS doing 
all that stuff. They had a flight simulator running on it which was full 
screen RAY TRACED, and it allowed you to do anything you wanted. They 
had a demo of a CAD program running on it which was, naturally, ray 
traced, and you were able to travel anywhere you wanted in your 
ray-traced environment. They also had a Terminator 2 commercial running 
on it in real time, as well as a Pixar animation being generated on the 
fly, as well as a constantly moving RAY TRACED F-14 Tomcat, which you 
could rotate along each axis manually by moving the mouse in various 
directions, ALL WITH NO SLOWDOWN. The person doing the demo opened the 
box, which WAS an Indigo, and there was next to NOTHING IN IT AT ALL! 
There was still about 60%+ room free for future expansion!

> 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!

No kidding. I'll be getting one myself, as soon as I can afford it. 
However, by the time I make enough to buy one, They'll be SO ADVANCED, 
the Reality Studio will be the LOW end model. :-( Mata ne.

                                                        -=]> Max <[=-

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|Kup- "This reminds me of the time when my   +-> Kup- "You ever SEEN a Regulan|
|      my platoon was stranded on Regulan IV;|         Metal Monger, lad?"    |
|      there we were, only SEVEN HUNDRED of  |   Hot Rod- "Uh, no,..."        |
|      US, against THREE WHOLE REGULAN METAL |   Kup- "TRUST me! We were      |
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