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From: upl@puff.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Amgia World Ray-tracing article...
Message-ID: <649@puff.WISC.EDU>
Date: Wed, 15-Apr-87 14:15:20 EST
Article-I.D.: puff.649
Posted: Wed Apr 15 14:15:20 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Apr-87 03:07:07 EST
References: <629@puff.WISC.EDU> <2985@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Reply-To: upl@puff.WISC.EDU (Future Unix Gurus)
Distribution: comp
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 27
Keywords: cost

>A Cray will run you a minimum greater than $120,000, that's 100 Amigas with
>an *extremely* conservative estimate on the cost of Crays.  What Apollo did
>with 22 days (or was it 23?) of Apollo cpu on ~100 Apollos.  I presume that
>we will consider the staff to maintain both setups to be of equivalent cost
>favoring the Amiga staff on being able to still afford beer and chinese food.
>

Okay. 2 people have done this, and both have missed the point.
(1) The relative complexity of the pictures generated for professional
    use on Crays (and Pixars) is MANY MANY orders of magnitude greater than
    what he is generating from his amiga program that takes an hour/frame.
    Also the rendering is much more subtle and complex. If you are gonna
    seriously do a price performance analysis, you have to time the two
    for the SAME results.
(2) Two years for 10 minutes of film is ludicrous for film production
    no matter HOW you slice it. 

These wouldn't be as much of an issue if HE didn't bring up both subjects
himself in his article, while failing to really explore them.

I own an Amiga, I love my Amiga, and I am working on making it a viable
low-end film tool. Any technique which takes an hour/frame however is
never gonna be of use for film production. Period.

Jeff Kesselman
uwvax!puff!upl
upl@puff.cs.wisc.edu