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The thing I remember about DEC Alpha was that they were used as renderfarm processors by special effects artists working in Lightwave on Amiga (for shows like B

by gdubs 7y ago

The thing I remember about DEC Alpha was that they were used as renderfarm processors by special effects artists working in Lightwave on Amiga (for shows like Babylon 5, etc). I used to drool over ads for DEC Alpha “screamernet” machines hooked up to Amiga 4000s. Alas, I was stuck with a Tandy 486 SX...

h2odragon 7y ago
I got a rack of Alphas that were supposed to have been part of the farm doing water effects in "Titanic". One of the stack overflow poster mentioned how hard it was to actually get your hands on this hardware, even in 1999/2000 when they were second generation, it was difficult. They never did show up on the resale market much; it took me years to find out why: Credit Unions. A big Credit Union software package was written for Alpha (and apparently not ported) and there's still some folks stuck on this hardware. Something to do with the CPU having a "how to treat roundoff" switch i gather, and the fact that they're great at chopping strings by bytes which old finance protocols do quite a lot of.
Wistar 7y ago
The animation studio I worked for in the mid-late 90s was a Softimage shop using SGI Indigo and Intel pentium workstations with a 20-30 machine Alpha (NT) render farm. It was a very good setup with one weird issue: depending on the type of render being done, especially anything with ray marching, the SGI or Intel workstations couldn't participate in the render because the results looked subtly different.
- rowanG077 7y ago
  Probably a bug in the render code that made it look different.
  - Wistar 7y ago
    It was explained to me as a difference in the way certain arithmetic calculation were made in the actual hardware. The render engine was mental ray. It was really only apparent if there were atmospherics, such as volumetric lighting, in the scene. Net renders with the workstations participating would come back with some of the resulting tiles looking noticeably different—the density of the atmospheric effects (ray marching) would appear to have differing densities between the alpha-rendered tiles and the SGI or Intel-rendered tiles.

by gdubs 7y ago

h2odragon 7y ago

I got a rack of Alphas that were supposed to have been part of the farm doing water effects in "Titanic". One of the stack overflow poster mentioned how hard it was to actually get your hands on this hardware, even in 1999/2000 when they were second generation, it was difficult. They never did show up on the resale market much; it took me years to find out why: Credit Unions. A big Credit Union software package was written for Alpha (and apparently not ported) and there's still some folks stuck on this hardware. Something to do with the CPU having a "how to treat roundoff" switch i gather, and the fact that they're great at chopping strings by bytes which old finance protocols do quite a lot of.

Wistar 7y ago

The animation studio I worked for in the mid-late 90s was a Softimage shop using SGI Indigo and Intel pentium workstations with a 20-30 machine Alpha (NT) render farm. It was a very good setup with one weird issue: depending on the type of render being done, especially anything with ray marching, the SGI or Intel workstations couldn't participate in the render because the results looked subtly different.

rowanG077 7y ago
Probably a bug in the render code that made it look different.
- Wistar 7y ago
  It was explained to me as a difference in the way certain arithmetic calculation were made in the actual hardware. The render engine was mental ray. It was really only apparent if there were atmospherics, such as volumetric lighting, in the scene. Net renders with the workstations participating would come back with some of the resulting tiles looking noticeably different—the density of the atmospheric effects (ray marching) would appear to have differing densities between the alpha-rendered tiles and the SGI or Intel-rendered tiles.