I have worked extensively with both SGIs and modern PC (nvidia) graphics chips (I make video games for a living, so I care _a lot_ about how fast the graphics are).
The nVidia chips, especially the GeForce3, are awesome. They can push more raw polygons than the SGIs can (except for the multipipe Onyxs, but most people don't have them :-) In fact, when dealing with polygonal objects, modern PCs will beat all of the SGIs pretty much hands down.
However, the place that the SGIs win is when dealing with textures...especially rapidly updated textures like video. The unified memory system which current SGIs have (like the O2, etc) means that texture updates are extremely fast. When I did performance tests, I often saw little to no difference between texturing with video and texturing with a still image. On PCs, the PCI/AGP bus is the bottleneck, in a big way. For example, in our games on PC, we try to minimize the amount of textures going across the bus due to the performance hits and stalls which occur. This is one of the reasons why the video and movie objects don't work very well on the PC. A number of very specific objects were created to deal with this problem, like loading a sequence of images into the graphics card TRAM and indexing through them, instead of uploading a new image each time.
Of course, once we get Pd/GEM running on a Playstation2 with Linux, that will be the platform to work on :-)
Later, Mark
============================ = mdanks@stormfront.com = Lead Programmer PS2 = http://www.danks.org/mark ============================
-----Original Message----- From: IOhannes m zmoelnig [mailto:zmoelnig@iem.kug.ac.at] Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 7:25 AM To: CK; pd-list Subject: Re: [PD] ggee | zexy | d_mp3 for SGI?
CK wrote:
I read:
how comes ? now that pc's are that fast, who wants to use
a sgi-computer
(appart from historical reasons, which should not bother
us with pd (but
with ispw-max...)). but maybe this is religious
not only religious, the fact that the bus architecture in
contemporary
sgi machines (and native opengl) makes gem significantly more fun to use ...
this sounds interesting, since using gem with my nvidia-geforce-hw-accelerated openGl (but of course not "native" in sgi ways) is very much fun too. where do you get real improvements ? moving/texturing/blabla a LOT of objects costs me almost no cpu-time - at least with my geforce256; i made not so good experiences with the newer geforce2. maybe the antialiasing could be done a little better, but that's the only thing i can think of (but then, i am not that grafix-expert)
mfg.cdsa.il IOhannes