> $5k is not steep for what these effects houses do with thier hardware,
> what is funny is that the only effects houses and other such companies
> that use linux are the ones who can afford the custom programming, like
> digital domain, silicon grail (maybe they did not want sgi to know that),
> R&H probably has a little too. but even if they ran linux, graphics boxes
> would still easily cost more than that. $5k is about about as cheap as you
> can get for a DEC. for render time, alphas give better price/performance
> than intel. there are plently of wintel boxes being sold at around $10k,
> and they usually have much more RAM and hard disk space the the similarly
> priced O2 (suppposedly better graphics performance, but ive never tired it
> and dont really believe in benchmarks)
I have used several different sgi workstations here, using softimage among
other programs. I have personally used indy, indy2 and indigo compuers.
I also know some people who have used O2s.
I'm happy/sad to say, that sgi's reputation is misfounded.
All three that I have used were incredibly slow. So slow in fact, that
even in NT a pentium 200 MMX machine, with a simple $200 graphics card,
such as the fire gl pro 1000, and only 32MB of ram will blow the indys et
al. out of the water, both in rendering and modeling speed.
As for the O2s, well similar can be said, they model slightly smoother
than the indys and than said machine, but they still render terribly. Btw
for you info, the indies use 100MHZ MIPS and 133MHZ MIPS and the O2's use
166MH MIPS. So for a mere $3000 you can smoke the low end sgi computers.
BTW, from experience and friends, the conclusion we have all come to, are
the only sgi computers that are interesting and usefull are the mega
computers that fill up an entire room, such as the Onyx stations and the
PowerStation supercomputers. And those are outlandishly priced.
> one thing im thinking of doing, is getting an NT box and
> running exceed3d(xserver with hardware GL acceleration) to the linux box
> so i can use both at the same time. the idea here is to get both on the
> same desktop and to get acceleration for linux GL programs. the NT is also
> for programs that dont run on linux. NFS and/or samba may also be used.
>
> any thoughts on this?
I've used exceed, although not the GL one, and I've found it is terrible
slow. We even are using it across a 100Mb/sec fast ethernet lan and the
speed is barely usable for text editing. Don't even try with graphics.
> I already concidered sgi, the software is too
> expensive. (but i will admit i really like using alias) they are much more
> comfortable to use, and i would not have to put up with windows. I owuld
> not use NT if it wasnt for the software thing.
btw, if you are looking into alias, if I recall correctly, alias will run
on other systems than sgi. I'd look into that, seeing how over priced sgi
computers are...(mostly because of name)
