[PD] ggee | zexy | d_mp3 for SGI?

[Mark Danks]

  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 at stormfront.com
= Lead Programmer PS2
= http://www.danks.org/mark
============================
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: IOhannes m zmoelnig [mailto:zmoelnig at 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
>