[geeks] G1's and other mainframey goodness Was Compuholics anonymous

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 04:32:01PM -0400, Andrew Weiss wrote:

> I'd be in the same boat as Sambo, but I'm also broke... I eventually 
> want:
> 
> 1. z-Series machine or 390
> 2. Apple Network Server 700
> 3. E4500
> 4. NeXT DIMENSION Cube (big Kahuna at blackhole)
> 5. Big pSeries box and a Big i series box
> 6. Any Univac era computer (running/runnable)
> 7. Dual next gen Powermac (rumored G5 whatever... loaded)
> 8. A large Panzer tiger*
> 9. CM5
> 10. Origin 3000 system (with the pretty new design)
> 11. A good Octane desktop...(newish)
> 
> in no particular order...

The good octane should be pretty affordable, if you don't include the cost
of buying compilers or an OS upgrade.

Increasingly I'm leaning towards old mac + DC30 style card + Octane rather
than a do it all O2.  But, can't afford either really.

I'm going back on my previous opinion that texturing is a good idea for doing
video effects.  It can be used for video effects, but I've learned that
useing textured surfaces for warps and morphs is similar to what they did for
Willow (but I'm sure they weren't using OpenGL), but inferior compared to 
newer methods.  Further, streaming textures is never as fast as
glwritepixels.  Sprites for particle engines as small textured polys still
seems like a good idea, but if that is all that is really usefull for 
texturing in video processesing, then why limit oneself to a lowly O2 instead
of an Octane which, while lacking texturing in the affordable ones, still
implements the entire OpenGL imagining stuff into hardware.

That said, if you are limiting your support to platforms with texturing (like
say writing an application that only runs on MacOS X, or only runs on 
Onyxs), you might as well use texturing where it will help (perspective views
of the scene layout, perhaps shadowing, definately for sprites, etc).


--
Joshua D. Boyd