23 Jan
2007
23 Jan
'07
1:19 a.m.
Message: 5
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 10:12:03 -0700
From: Richard <legalize at xmission.com>
Subject: Re: Strange things found in a free SPARC 20
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Message-ID: <E1H92iB-0006EE-00 at xmission.xmission.com>
In article <45B4DDBC.5080303 at gmail.com>,
Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> writes:
There was, I believe, something that could be paired with a CG9 in the
Sun-3/early Sun-4 days. Ah yes, here it is: the GP2 graphics processor.
VME based, with Weitek engines.
Then there was the Leo/ZX option for SBUS.
Can't tell you anything about performance of either of these two.
With the introduction of the UPA bus things got better: Sun introduced
Creator/Creator3d and Elite3d. Of course, none of these graphics could
touch what SGI was putting out, but it was a valiant attempt. Creator3d
used the SPARC for geometry but had onboard Z-buffer calculations,
Elite3d had a full graphics pipeline but not much texture cache.
Can't say anything about the really off-topic stuff for the current
machines.
[...] Did Sun ever make an
accelerated 24-bit card?
Yes, they made a bunch of different 3D accelerators during the 90s
(and most likely beyond, but I haven't been attending SIGGRAPH often
enough to say for sure). Ironically, they didn't start making good 3D
accelerators until they hired ex-Evans & Sutherland engineers. I can
concur that working at E&S was good training in 3D! They really knew
their engineering, its such a shame that marketing and management were
utter failures.
--
"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/>