4 ms·

"Just", as if taking tech from a $4,000 card and making it available for $400 isn't an enormous feat of engineering!

ernst_klim 8y ago
It's not a $4,000 card tho. Full SGI workstations cost from $4000 to $11000 (and this is with a display and software) [1]. This was a primitive texturing accelerator without T&L, without 2D, just a texturing unit. $400 was even a high price for it. [1] https://hsto.org/files/c34/cb5/939/c34cb59393e04c77af072be74703bf12.png https://hsto.org/files/c34/cb5/939/c34cb59393e04c77af072be74...
- bluedino 8y ago
  Yea, it was a hack. A good hack, but a hack. Speed-wise, 3dfx decimated all but the high-end boards at the time. GLiNT and Intergraphs low-end ards were still $3000-$5000 Those were 'real, workstation-level cards' with accurate rendering and all the OpenGL features. On the highest end were the Intergraph realizm cards which were 2X the price. Then you had the SGI systems that started out at 2x times the price of a loaded Integraph Workstation...
  - ernst_klim 8y ago
    Never heard of these, but matrox impression plus could full 3D for serious CADs (tho without textures I think) for $700.
- ben7799 8y ago
  Having used SGIs in the 1990s they didn't have any power at all until you spent many many many thousands of dollars. The ones that were impressive were the ones that might have been $20k+. At the time the Voodoo came out the run of the mill SGI workstations did not come with any of the advanced 3D graphics capabilites. Certainly nothing that blew you away. They did stuff like wireframe or unshaded 3D CAD and stuff like that, they had working OpenGL well before a PC did. But the stuff that blew you away was stuff like the Onyx. Those blew me away when I saw them in the mid 1990s when SGI came to recruit where I went to school. They were $100k+ a year or two before the Voodoo came out. There were other things they did that was way ahead of their time. I had an Indy for my workstation in 1996 at an internship. It had a webcam that could shoot stills or videos and do some basic video chat. In 1996. People used to fill up the hard drives with video cause hard drives were still so small. Irix had a really nice X Windows UI in the mid 1990s when Linux and the other commercial Unix variants had terrible UIs.
  - trasz 8y ago
    SGI was good for stuff it was made for, which was visualization and CAD. Which, in that time, meant no texturing - that one meant either an expensive hardware option, or software fallback.
    - ddingus 8y ago
      Except for the O2. Shared memory allowed for massive textures and transforms on them at real time frame rates.

It's not a $4,000 card tho. Full SGI workstations cost from $4000 to $11000 (and this is with a display and software) [1]. This was a primitive texturing accelerator without T&L, without 2D, just a texturing unit. $400 was even a high price for it. [1] https://hsto.org/files/c34/cb5/939/c34cb59393e04c77af072be74703bf12.png https://hsto.org/files/c34/cb5/939/c34cb59393e04c77af072be74...

bluedino 8y ago
Yea, it was a hack. A good hack, but a hack. Speed-wise, 3dfx decimated all but the high-end boards at the time. GLiNT and Intergraphs low-end ards were still $3000-$5000 Those were 'real, workstation-level cards' with accurate rendering and all the OpenGL features. On the highest end were the Intergraph realizm cards which were 2X the price. Then you had the SGI systems that started out at 2x times the price of a loaded Integraph Workstation...
- ernst_klim 8y ago
  Never heard of these, but matrox impression plus could full 3D for serious CADs (tho without textures I think) for $700.
ben7799 8y ago
Having used SGIs in the 1990s they didn't have any power at all until you spent many many many thousands of dollars. The ones that were impressive were the ones that might have been $20k+. At the time the Voodoo came out the run of the mill SGI workstations did not come with any of the advanced 3D graphics capabilites. Certainly nothing that blew you away. They did stuff like wireframe or unshaded 3D CAD and stuff like that, they had working OpenGL well before a PC did. But the stuff that blew you away was stuff like the Onyx. Those blew me away when I saw them in the mid 1990s when SGI came to recruit where I went to school. They were $100k+ a year or two before the Voodoo came out. There were other things they did that was way ahead of their time. I had an Indy for my workstation in 1996 at an internship. It had a webcam that could shoot stills or videos and do some basic video chat. In 1996. People used to fill up the hard drives with video cause hard drives were still so small. Irix had a really nice X Windows UI in the mid 1990s when Linux and the other commercial Unix variants had terrible UIs.
- trasz 8y ago
  SGI was good for stuff it was made for, which was visualization and CAD. Which, in that time, meant no texturing - that one meant either an expensive hardware option, or software fallback.
  - ddingus 8y ago
    Except for the O2. Shared memory allowed for massive textures and transforms on them at real time frame rates.