1 Dec
2010
1 Dec
'10
12:57 a.m.
On Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote:
I remember setting up a lab of brand-new top-of-the-line Octanes for the
California State University Geotech Lab several years ago. There were six
dual-headed machines. For some weird reason none of them had TRAMs. I
discovered this when I tried running Quake 2 and found that it was slower
than snail snot. One of the main purposes of the machines was to model
rock strata and fault lines to identify where oil would likely be trapped.
This involved a lot of 3D rotating things. The performance was not as I
expected. 3D molecular simulations ran just fine though.
I never understood why SGI made the texture memory seperate unless it was
just a ploy to nickle and dime the customers.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Since I know
nothing about SGIs...
Wajht is a TRAM in this context? (I can think of 2 meanings of the term,
the obvious one associated iwht public transport, and the less common one
associated with a certain microcprocessor, but I can't think either are
applicable here).
Tony, TRAMs are RAM modules used in the octane video board. The octane
video is accelerated for "plain" surfaces, but not texturized. Adding
the pair of TRAM modules on this video board, you make it capable of
rendering 3D graphics with textured surfaces.