Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pmafire!uudell!milano!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!wookumz.ai.mit.edu!rjc
From: rjc@wookumz.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Real-time graphics via computer - custom hardware?
Message-ID: <1990Dec12.025915.4178@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 90 02:59:15 GMT
References: <1990Dec08.075337.10213@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <61528@masscomp.ccur.com>
Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius)
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In article <61528@masscomp.ccur.com> mark@calvin.westford.ccur.com (Mark Thompson) writes:
>In article <1990Dec08.075337.10213@ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) writes:
>>I would like to build a graphics display which can display high-res color
>>images from a computer-generated list of objects (ie: the screen has xxx
>>objects, here are their coordinates, and apparent sizes) in real-time.  To
>>me, real-time means something better than 10-15 frames per second; like 30.
>>Resolution requirements are fairly high; perhaps as high as 1280x1024 in 256
>>colors.
[...]
>
>>Can an Amiga 3000 handle this kind of graphics load?  I know they have some
>>darn nice graphics capabilities, but are they up to something this nasty?
>
>NO off the shelf micro can handle real time rendering. The Amiga can't be
>beat for cost effective real time animation at up to 60 frames per second,
>however these are pre-computed animation loops. Unless you seriously
>degrade your scene complexity, remove smooth shading, and drop your resolution
>will you ever get close to 10-15 frames per second.

  The Amiga 3000 may be able to handle the job, if the job is simple enough.
If his scenes are composed of 50,000 vectors, or ray tracing. The A3000
can't do it. (Atleast not until the 68050, or some i860 board becomes
availible) If however he wants to do some simple solid modeling, like
maybe 8,000-10,000 vectors per second. The Amiga's blitter can handle this
fine. In fact, I have some nice Amiga demos that do real-time solid
modeled graphics (animated too) on a 7mhz A500. The only thing that is
precomputed is a table of cos/sin, and all the transformations/rotations of
vertices.
On an A3000 with the FPU, these matrix calculations could be performed in
real time. Still, I wouldn't recommend the A3000 until he describes
what he wants to do in more detail. He may need something like an Iris or
Sparc. There's always the new graphic boards becoming availible for
the Amiga line. Like the Video Toaster, VideoMaster 32, ColorBurst,etc.
(the last 2 are vaporware until after Christmas)

>Contacts:
>Levco........(619) 457-2011
>Lazerus......(415) 339-6263
>These are both good rendering engines but I do not know if they are capable
>of real-time animated rendering.

i860's are nice. I just don't like any Intel chips getting near my amiga :-)
Anybody know what the specs are on the Silicon Graphic's machines?

>Hope this helps.
>+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
>|  Mark Thompson                                                           |
>|  mark@westford.ccur.com                                                  |
>|  ...!{decvax,uunet}!masscomp!mark   Designing high performance graphics  |
>|  (508)392-2480                      engines today for a better tomorrow. |
>+------------------------------------------------------------------------- +