Alex Terrazas wrote: > By the way, Sowrizral apparently is doing > something unrelated to 3D graphics even.
IIRC - gigabit wireless networks (telco grade stuff, not 802.11). > That said, the PC so far can only handle 2 > screens--which I have running and it is > pretty nice. Depends on what you class as "PC". Have a look at the Quantum3D stuff. For years they've been selling ruggadised boxes that are "PCs" but with three PC graphics card. The first one really worth noting was based on Voodoo cards and cost about 30K. They had a nice 3-screen wall demo at Siggraph. From what I remember, they had something external in their hardware that genlocked the individual PC cards outside the normal card allowing you to substitute almost any card in there. We were particularly interested in it at one stage because of the ruggadised nature of the system allowing us to drop it out the back of aircraft etc. > One thing I like is that > I can reposition my two screens all over > the place-front back-sides--if I could do > this with a single PC and 4-6 screens, we > would really have something. Well what you really want to look at is a lot of what was going on at Siggraph last year where they were doing walls with commodity hardware. There was a variety of different approaches to how the rendering tasks were split up. I think this is much easier to do than a CAVE though as the wall is a flat surface allowing that variety of approaches, where a CAVE isn't really a single big flat surface that is "bent" into shape on the walls (but very different to DOMEs, which could). I can't see that you would have much problem in general. Probably Genlocking the individual PCs is the major issue so that your glasses worked correctly. > The counter to the argument is that with 4-6 > screens, graphics cards, tracking, etc. who > cares that the PC costs 5-10K less--indeed, > a single Sun CPU could drive all the graphics > pipelines (I think) and that would save. Possibly. The Sun boxes OEM Wildcat chips from 3DLabs. From reading through the specs, these are the same chips you can buy as PC cards. The major difference therefore will be I/O bandwidth. A Sun box should be able to drive more textures, but probably not more polygons over an equivalently equipped PC. If you want to see what good PC hardware is, have a look at the Oxygen cards that come with the 4 processors. They cost an arm and a leg, so the then surrounding costs of the PC is negligible anyway, so you might as well get the better I/O of the Sun machine. > would cost another $1500 or so--what is the > future of multiple pipes on PC? Why is this > so hard for PC's but not other platforms? Hardware architecture. PCs suck. Maybe with the new architecture from the NV20 chipsets where they are using a crossbar architecture to drive main/video/peripheral interfaces you may have something that is better. For the standard northbridge/southbridge/PCI/AGP setup of traditional PC chipsets, forget about it. They'll never have the bandwidth to cope with driving multiple pipes in parallel. > Another idea-should we form a special interest > group for CAVES, much like Justin did for > terrain? Well, I wouldn't call the terrain list a success currently. Initial activity and now gone dead silently. I think everyone that joined wanted to learn and had nobody that has actually done. Considering disbanding it actually. -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
