Following on from Justin's comments, it was the Expert3D card that used a
modified Wildcat chip with a PCI interface. The latest framebuffer from Sun
is XVR-1000, which uses a UPA (crossbar) interface. Each XVR-1000 can drive
2 displays, so that a SunBlade 2000 which has 2 UPA slots can drive 4 displays.
I'm hoping to try this combination out on a 3-display theatre setup in about
a month.
As in any system, getting the balance right is important, and identifying the
bottleneck resource that prevents it from scaling further helps. Two cpus
driving 4 heads may not be enough for some classes of application. Then there's
the size of texture memory cache required. If the working set doesn't fit in
texture memory performance falls off the edge. Another issue that is starting
to emerge is visual quality, and using hardware supersampling to provide
high-quality antialiasing. Design studios tend to be pretty fussy about this.
Stereo tends to limit the available display resolutions, so that you can have
a choice between high resolution e.g. 1920x1200 or stereo, or in the case of
XVR-1000 driving multiple heads. This is what I find interesting about
visualisation solutions--its a multicriterion optimisation problem with a
range of possibilities depending on need.
> 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.
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