SGI Reality Monster drives/OS?

In article <10e701c78396$308d5410$f0fea8c0 at alpha>, "Alexandre Souza" <alexandre-listas at e-secure.com.br> writes: Like most things in graphics, "it depends" ;-). PCs probably can't even come close to the RealityMonster machine. There is also the bandwidth of the I/O system and busses to consider when comparing to a PC. Once you get the whole scene loaded into a PC card it can scream, but if the scene has to be paged in to the 3D card on a PC, then you're at the mercy of your system bus, clock rate and disk rates. There are also graphics features that these workstations have that aren't well supported on PCs until very recently. Things like volume rendering. Then there's the fact that the higher end SGI cards can do 12-bits per channel, for 48-bit RGB output, allowing for extremely high quality graphics rendering. The last time that I personally programmed an SGI box was 1997, so its been a while for me. However, SGI was largely driven by scientific visualization, simulation and the entertainment industry (read: Hollywood) while the PC market is driven by gaming. These are very different markets. In the PC market, its hard to get a hardware vendor interested in your requested feature if its not going to be used in games. Then again, the PC cards are becoming so programmable that nobody requests specific features anymore, they just request more bandwidth, more memory and more programmability. Most of the SGI hardware engineers ended up at NVidia, so its no surprise that the PC cards are displacing more and more SGI machines. The one big exception that I know of is Kurt Akeley, who is an SGI founded, and is now heading up the graphics research group for Microsoft in Beijing. SGI machines of this variety do seem to be increasingly rare. They don't show up on ebay much because they require freight shipping. I more often see parts for these machines showing up on ebay. They don't show up on dovebid much either -- these machines and an Onyx that I bought earlier are the first that have shown up on dovebid since I've been monitoring. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>