chuck@melmac.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano) (10/11/89)
I am the proud new owner of a 4D/50GTB, and have been having lots of fun coming up to speed writing graphics code. Here are some general questions I have which others in this group may be able to answer: How can you see exactly which graphics hardware you have? The manuals mention using "hinv", which says nothing about graphics hardware. "hinv -v" doesn't say anything more than "hinv". Are there any papers/references which describe how the rendering engines function? Which format is fastest when sending vertices to the graphics pipe, shorts, ints, floats, or doubles? What is the internal numeric format of the pipeline? When can I expect my copy of 3.2, with the Personal Wavefront package on it? Can I just get a copy of the Wavefront stuff in the meantime? Is anyone at SGI going to proofread those manuals? They are rife with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. While I like the nice binders, accurate text is even nicer. Are there really 256 vertex limits on the polygon and tmesh routines? I drew a tmesh with 1200 vertices with no problem. Exactly which combinations of colors and Z values are required on a 4D/50GTB to get czclear() to do an optimized clear of the frame buffer and the Z buffer? The documentation is very confusing. When I run "gr_osview -a" to see what the CPU spends its time waiting on, it seems to be spending 100% of its time waiting on the graphics FIFO to empty. Is this really the case? Does this mean that the machine is at top rendering speed? I was under the impression that the graphics hardware is much faster than the CPU in the 50, and that performance could be gained by just adding a faster CPU, like in a 4D/70 or 4D/80. Well, I suppose that's enough for now. Also, many kudoes to SGI, for making the system so easy to unpack and install. After fighting to get the OS installed and configued on Suns, it was a dream to boot the machine, give it my NFS tape, let it get everything set, change two files, and be up and running! Chuck Musciano ARPA : chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com Harris Corporation Usenet: ...!uunet!x102a!trantor!chuck PO Box 37, MS 3A/1912 AT&T : (407) 727-6131 Melbourne, FL 32902 FAX : (407) 727-{5118,5227,4004} Gee, Beaver, everything that's fun can get you in trouble. Haven't you learned that yet? --Gilbert