hsg@duke.cs.duke.edu (Henry Greenside) (05/01/91)
Can anyone comment critically about the suitability of a Nextdimension for scientific visualization? My main short term need is looking at animated time-dependent color contour plots of data, for which the compression chip and i860 sound quite suitable. But how likely is the i860, as implemented in the Nextdimension, to compete with a low-end Iris or Sparc II-GS for general purpose 8-bit or 24-bit rendering, rotation, slicing, X-graphics, etc.? Does the Nextdimension run only Postscript? If so, I would guess this might be a severe penalty for some kinds of 3d graphics operations. I have tried to contact several people at Ohio State to see if anyone could talk about their experiences in porting and using apE (a popular essentially free scivi program) on a Nextdimension, but got no replies. At Duke, there is a roughly 50% discount on Sun equipment (a special deal for a few months), so I am trying to compare a NeXTdimension with a Sparc II-GS, which have almost identical costs. There seem to be classic tradeoffs. The Next machine has slower CPU but superior software environment, has video input and output with compression. The Sun machine is substantially more powerful, has a nicer screen, has 24-bit graphics support, but a more difficult software environment, no image compression, no upgradability, no inexpensive video i/o. If there is interest, I can post a summary of replies. Henry