[HN Gopher] The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fant...
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The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996
Author : marcobambini
Score : 442 points
Date : 2022-04-07 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lunduke.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lunduke.substack.com)
| Melatonic wrote:
| Now I want to know what they were using to animate the 3D assets
| that ran on the Sega Genesis (1988) and the add-on Sega 32X
| (released 1994)!
| ei8ths wrote:
| one thing i dont miss, those monitors.
| jscheel wrote:
| I studied 3d animation in college from 2001-2004. Our lab was
| outfitted with tons of SGI Octane workstations. By the end, we
| were getting better performance out the the one lone mac there,
| though. Was such an awesome animation lab. I kinda miss those
| days.
| lispm wrote:
| Such a Lisp Machine is usually one machine with two screens.
| Typically it would be a XL1200 (or earlier an XL400). It would
| have a black&white console and a color screen. The color screen
| would be driven by a color graphics card, possibly a FrameThrower
| - which is an accelerated graphics card.
|
| The graphics editor seen is just the S-Paint part of S-Graphics -
| it could use a FrameThrower, but also other graphics cards. There
| was also S-Paint on the MacIvory running in a Macintosh.
| S-Graphics also ran on earlier Lisp Machines from Symbolics, like
| a 3670 from 1984.
|
| A bunch of TV studios, video production companies, animation
| studios and game developers were customers.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwer_xKrmI4 from 6:09 shows the
| using such a Paint system on a Symbolics.
|
| The software it runs is S-Graphics, which was later ported to
| SGIs and Windows machines as N-World, by Nichimen (then using
| Allegro CL from Franz Inc.).
| eddieh wrote:
| I had no idea these machines existed. When tasked with writing
| a ray tracer way back in college, the first thing I did was
| create a scene description format based on S-expressions.
| Yesterday I was nostalgically looking at backups of the
| assignment and found my first scene file:
| (camera 0 0 -20) ; red sphere (sphere
| 0 1 50 5 (material (color 255 127 127) 0.8 0.8))
| ; green sphere (sphere -20 1 200 9 (material (color 127
| 255 127) 0.8 0.8)) (plane 0 1 0 20 (material
| (color 127 127 255) 0.8 0.8))
|
| I went so far as to make the scenes scriptable with Guile. I
| had another scene that procedurally generated spheres
| positioned about a helix, but that seems to be lost to the bit
| gods.
|
| To me, there's something very natural about using S-expressions
| to create graphics. I wish there was a video (with a high
| enough resolution) that shows the Lisp interactions--especially
| in the subdivision modeler.
| lispm wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU&t=5s
| miltondts wrote:
| The more I look at software from the 80-90s, even the 60s the
| more it seems it has barely moved in terms of capabilities.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was
| an absolute powerhouse. The machines were powered by between one
| and four MIPS processors (originally the R4400's) -- ranging from
| 100 MHz to 250 MHz.
|
| 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486
| era.
|
| > The RAM on these machines were not industry standard [...] and
| could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version
| (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version).
|
| 8 gig of RAM at a time when home users didn't even have 1 GB hard
| drives. 16 GB of RAM at a time when a home user's desktop could
| read memory at < 100 MB/s.
|
| Having those specs then would be like running a 37 Ghz CPU with
| 16 TB of RAM now.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Their price reflected their capabilities. I think they were
| something like $20k on the low end. A nice new car in 1993 was
| maybe $10k. Lots of homes even in good cities sold for $20k.
|
| edit: Wow these were actually $100-250k! Back in 1993 that was
| an immense amount of money. I bet you could have bought a nice
| San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for
| $100k back then.
| jweir wrote:
| In 1993 I bought a used SGI Personal Iris for 10k.
|
| 32mb Ram, 1GB hard drive, 19"monitor. Monitor and system
| weight 80lbs if I remember correctly.
|
| Alias was an additional 16k.
|
| It sounded like a jet engine.
|
| I loved it.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| omg. i have magazines from this era. what were you using it
| for ? tell us more!
| holoduke wrote:
| I wonder where all those machines ended up. Would love to
| get one and play with them.
| [deleted]
| smm11 wrote:
| I gave one away several years back to a high school art
| department. The other one is in my garage under two
| inches of dust.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| well you should consider auctioning that, it will fetch
| lot of eager attention
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Including the dust, if it is from the same era!
| tomatowurst wrote:
| put that in a non-descript zip bag and include it in the
| shipping box!
| eternityforest wrote:
| If only housing had the same kind of price drop
| ajmurmann wrote:
| If regulations for building houses were compostable to
| those for building computers...
|
| Just think you had to ask the most opinionated people in
| your town every time you want to get a new computer and
| potentially ask people in your neighborhood when you want
| to make minor changes to you existing computer...
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Microsoft is the new HOA, and Google the new building
| commission.
| imtringued wrote:
| Houses got bigger faster than they got cheaper. That's on
| top of land going up in value.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Yeah that's the problem, you can't just make more land,
| so there's no incentive to do anything other than make
| any area you own into an expensive area.
| brailsafe wrote:
| must be nice to have made a 30x return on your house in 30
| years
| tomatowurst wrote:
| how about 50x return? Home that cost $100,000 CAD is now
| well past $5,000,000 where I live. If someone hodl'd their
| property in Vancouver even longer than that they would be
| seeing 100x return.
| namecheapTA wrote:
| In the central valley of California, a house cost $130k in
| 1993 and today sells for $400k. In those 30 years you
| probably painted it a few times, changed the roof just
| recently, changed the kitchen, and so forth. Plus 30 years
| of property tax. So you're probably in for $200k on that
| $130k house. And that's not even counting interest on
| mortgages that most buyers had in 1993.
|
| Doubling your money in 30 years isn't great at all. And
| this is within about 50 miles of tech jobs, although the
| drive will take 90 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes at
| night.
| peregren wrote:
| You also get to live in the house which is a pretty good
| return.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Houses do have utility. Doubling your money _in an asset
| that provided living space for 30 years instead of paying
| rent_ is pretty great.
| namecheapTA wrote:
| Ok yes but even if this was a rental home and the renters
| basically paid the mortgage.. so you didn't get any
| utility out of it. 30 years later you made $200k, even if
| you put basically nothing down. As a return it's a lot
| percentage wise. Overall though, it's not life changing
| for most people. It only gets crazy money in the most
| desirable of areas. And that desire circle is basically
| described as driving range from the highest paying jobs.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| But they don't have so much utility that they should
| offer such returns on top of depreciation. The market is
| broken.
| iso1210 wrote:
| It's not the house that appreciates much in value, its
| the land the house sits on.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> In the central valley of California, a house cost
| $130k in 1993 and today sells for $400k_
|
| Holy shiz, is California real estate really that cheap?
|
| 400K is a very basic house in the outskirts of a city in
| Austria(Europe), and tech jobs here pay 1/4 of what you
| can make in California. I feel we're being scammed over
| here with housing and wages.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you're willing to basically live in the boonies, yes.
| But you're not finding housing in or around the cities
| for less than a million in california. the median house
| in my area (after a skim on Zillow) is 800k and I'm a
| good hour north of downtown Los Angeles. Move another 30
| minutes north (pretty much in literal desert) and housing
| is more around these numbers of 400-500k.
|
| But who knows? With WFH being more accepted I can see
| some less city oriented folk moving out to those areas
| and gentrifying it. It may be desert, but it still has
| everything you'd want out of a neighborhood outside of
| entertainment.
| sneak wrote:
| The central valley isn't really "on the outskirts of the
| city" in the American sense. It's a lot of farmland.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| namecheapTA wrote:
| If houses are so expensive vs labor, you could always buy
| some land and have one built? The central valley city I
| was talking about is Tracy, CA. Without traffic, it's
| takes 1 hour driving to get to the tech companies. Monday
| to Friday at rush hour it would take 2 hours. 90 minutes
| offpeak at 9am instead of 7am. Virtually zero tech
| workers are willing to make that drive.
|
| Also, quality of life in Tracy is pretty poor. Property
| crime is pretty big. Virtually nothing for children to
| do. Young adults go to the same 5-6 average restaurants
| and that's it. I'd much prefer to live in a town near a
| nice city in Austria.
| aeyes wrote:
| Labor is expensive though. It's just that your income in
| relation to labor cost is relatively low due to high
| taxes, health insurance, pension fund and so on.
| Including your employers payments you go home with maybe
| 40% of what the company pays for your work.
|
| Building even a simple new home will set you back at
| least 300k.
| namecheapTA wrote:
| I guess quit your job for a year and build your own home!
| Maybe get into the home building business altogether.
| Melatonic wrote:
| You do not want to live in the central valley - that is
| why it is so cheap
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| The real winners are the boomer generation. When they
| graduated college in the mid 60's wages were enormous
| relative to the cost of property. Property in all the now
| hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too. If you bought
| in SF back then you've probably made 100x or more on the
| property value.
| stergios wrote:
| I think the house prices were higher. I sold a house in
| Mountain View (Monta Loma neighborhood) in Jan 1995 for
| $255k. And that was a bit of a distressed sale as I was the
| executor for an estate.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house
| in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then.
|
| To be honest, the idea of even getting a down payment of 100K
| for a house like that in SF is insanity. Crazy how prices
| skyrocketed in 30 years (I'm guessing 2008 didn't help much).
| Razengan wrote:
| I loved QBasic
| bluedino wrote:
| > 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz
| 486 era.
|
| To be fair I don't think the 200MHz chips came out until 1995,
| when you could also get a Pentium Pro in similar speeds.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now.
|
| Something common in the hypervisor admin space is expressing
| the compute capacity by multiplying the core count with the
| clock speed.
|
| So for example a 64 core EPYC at 2.5GHz is written down in
| documentation as a 160 GHz processor.
|
| So these Onyx desktops are directly comparable to artists using
| a high-end Mac Pro or Threadripper workstation.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| OTOH, these machines were already quad processors (at the
| high end). And I don't know if you can feasibly have 16TB of
| RAM in a single compute node. In that case you'd need a rack-
| scale multi-node system like the gear the Oxide folks are
| pushing for "hyperscaler" workloads. (My guess is that such a
| thing _could_ be made useful to a single user - along the
| lines of Alan Kay 's quote referenced in a sibling comment -
| but it would likely need to be something that involves
| chewing through humongous amounts of data, to really make use
| of that scale. Not sure if the art-creation use case has any
| real need for that nowadays. Some sort of compute-heavy data
| analytics for decision support and the like would be a lot
| closer to the mark.)
| tomxor wrote:
| If you want to use that metric then the Onyx would be:
|
| 4x 250MHz R4400s + 12x 40MHz Intel i860s = 1480 MHz when
| maxed out.
|
| But clock speed is a very poor metric for comparing older
| CPUs. The size of these CPUs were much smaller, the number of
| instructions they could cram into each clock cycle and
| complexity of those instructions was no doubt far lower, and
| the variety of instructions and ability to specialise far
| lower (i'm not even considering the whole RISC and MIPS
| thing, just the fact that they are working with much smaller
| dies and far fewer, larger gates)... instructions per second
| might be a better comparison, but then you still lack that
| qualitative difference in the variety of instruction as i
| said.
| p_l wrote:
| Another cpu with similar clock of that era was Alpha, whose
| first real supplies were 150MHz, quickly updated to 200MHz
| slightwinder wrote:
| > 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz
| 486 era.
|
| More precisely, it was the start of the Pentium era. The First
| Pentiums with 60/66 MHz were released in March 1993. But
| interesting enough, it seems the R4400 were already 64-bit.
| theodric wrote:
| My Indigo 2 R4400SC couldn't run 64-bit IRIX. For that I had
| to swap the motherboard and CPU for an R10000.
| sandos wrote:
| I once worked on a military simulator, and it ran on very
| similar hardware, it might even have been the onyx. Actually
| yes I do believe thats it now that I've googled it! I worked on
| this in 2011-12, and I can tell you compiling stuff was not
| fast! It was kind of funny thinking that this had once been a
| "supercomputer"... now it was slower than even old desktops!
| downrightmike wrote:
| I just wish they would find a better port to remaster, the
| current one is a low resolution mess and looks far worse on PS4
| than the original on PS1 because it was a bad PC port back in
| the day and were the only files they could find.
| louhike wrote:
| Unfortunately they lost all the files of the original game,
| so they can only: - Use the PC port - Emulate the PS1 game -
| Rebuild it (which will take a lot of time and resources)
| colordrops wrote:
| > Unfortunately they lost all the files of the original
| game
|
| I'm always flabbergasted when I hear of something like
| this. Such as NASA losing many videos of the moon landing.
| How does that happen?!
|
| Could the existing copies of the game out there be reverse
| engineered?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > How does that happen?!
|
| to be frank, carelessness.
|
| in the sympathetic sense, this was decades ago, wear and
| tear happens, and coporate orgs are messy. When
| Squaresoft merged with Enix, there was inevitably going
| to have some stuff, important stuff even, lost in the
| move. Even if they were perfectly careful to keep things
| archived.
|
| But From their own mouth, it was just a different time
| where archiving wasn't important:
| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/square-enix-digital-
| preserv...
|
| > The concept of games preservation is a relatively
| recent one, and as Matsuda admits: "It's very hard to
| find them sometimes, because back in the day you just
| made them and put them out there and you were done - you
| didn't think of how you were going to sell them down the
| road. Sometimes customers ask, 'Why haven't you released
| that [game] yet?' And the truth of the matter is it's
| because we don't know where it has gone."
|
| The 80's was just a small wing of developers trying to
| put out a toy. They weren't thinking of the original
| Final Fantasy as the Sistene Chapel of gaming. They
| thought as much about preserving it as I did about
| preserving that game jam game I made almost a decade ago.
| If it wasn't as easy for me to preserve it as throwing it
| on dropbox, I probably woulda lost my source code too.
|
| >Could the existing copies of the game out there be
| reverse engineered?
|
| It's physically possible. But the effort to extract
| assets, scene data, and source code and re-configure that
| into a clean port is much more gargantuan than using the
| source from "a bad port" and working from there.
|
| Even if they did manage to do that, that's another thing
| about video game code that's only now starting to be less
| true; it's an utter mess of spaghetti code. Games weren't
| made to be maintained for years by a revolving door of
| developers like a website, and few people will ever see
| the code. They get something working, and leave it there
| as long as its not bothering anyone. coding standards
| were very loose
|
| I'm sure many small intricacies people come to appreciate
| were merely products of rushed development at the 11th
| hour, with non-important bugs that just stayed in the
| final product. Even if they preserved the code, those
| imperfections fans appreciate would likely be patched out
| anyways (See: Backwards long jump in Super Mario 64 being
| removed in subsequent releases).
| shaunxcode wrote:
| followed the link to see lisp machines - was not disappointed!
| depingus wrote:
| Wow this brought back memories! In the late 90's, I got to work
| on SGI machines at college learning 3D animation in Maya v1! The
| school had 4 labs with about 30 SGI O2's in each; all networked
| with no security. I could send messages from my workstation to
| the teacher's open terminal session.
|
| No one there knew (or cared to learn) IRIX. When they converted
| the biggest lab to Windows NT4 everyone abandoned the SGI
| machines. Which worked out great for me, because it was much more
| peaceful in the SGI labs compared to the NT4 lab. Some of those
| StarCraft matches could get kinda rowdy!
| jgrahamc wrote:
| This sort of archaeology is great fun. I spent a huge amount of
| time figuring out what was happening on the screens in the first
| Westworld film (1973):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| I recently put together a timeline of tech-ish things, to help
| put events like this into perspective:
| https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840...
|
| Good for a few surprises: "wow, python is older than win 3.1!"
| npunt wrote:
| Oh man the memories of this time. Around 97-98 was when
| workstations were on the way out and workstation cards were on
| the way in, but regardless these SGI boxes were just so
| lustworthy - the style, the performance, the _otherness_ and
| clear superiority in all dimensions to my lowly hacked together
| PC.
|
| I was just a teen getting into 3D animation & game design in
| 1998, and since I couldn't ask my parents to mortgage the house
| to buy one, I wound up picking up a workstation card instead - a
| footlong Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 402 with 32mb ram and four
| 3dlabs chips - for a much more reasonable $750 used. I think
| about a year and a half before these went for $4k new, that was
| the pace of 3d innovation at the time. It suited me really well
| to learn Softimage 3D on until I got a job at Pandemic Studios as
| an artist/designer. Even this beast of a workstation card
| couldn't run Quake without errors though, there was still a
| separation of functionality between consumer 3D accelerators like
| 3dfx and the $1k+ workstation ones.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| In another life I worked on a SGI Onyx for Print PrePress of
| Rotogravure Cylinders. Now I am working in VFX and sometimes I
| read up on the history of it usually the Onyx pops up and even if
| I did something completely different than the VFX artists at the
| time I get nostalgic.
| theonething wrote:
| The SGI Indy "pizza box" was also a VFX and 3D animation classic
| in that era.
| bluedino wrote:
| The Indy didn't have any 3D hardware in it.
| theonething wrote:
| No, it didn't, but the R5000 CPU had an enhanced instruction
| set that could do 3D rendering in software pretty well at the
| time.
|
| We used them at the VFX software shop I was interning at
| during those times.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Really wondering how the Indy has this hagiographic
| reputation. It was, as far as I could tell at the time, the
| slowest and generally worst workstation you could buy. People
| bought them because they were waiting for unix technical
| software to be ported to Windows NT on x86 and didn't want to
| spend $100k per seat on RISC workstations they knew were
| already obsolete.
| fit2rule wrote:
| midnightclubbed wrote:
| I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous
| amounts of SGI hardware in the building. As I recall each artist
| had an SGI Indigo2 and later on the SGI O2 because the standard
| artist workstation. I believe our lead artist used an SGI Onyx.
| Programmers had Indy2's with the internal N64 development boards.
|
| There were at least 2 rack mounted SGI machines used for large-
| scale rendering jobs (ie promotional images, magazine covers
| etc). May have been SGI Challenges (I know one certainly was) and
| were kept off-limits to most staff, at the time they were rumored
| to cost $250k each.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Get us another Banjo Kazooie already!
| rootsudo wrote:
| That's really cool. :) I wonder if you should share any stories
| of working at Rareware during that time period?
| tomatowurst wrote:
| ohhh i fantasize about being 3d artist / producer in the 90s.
| i collect whatever I can find from this era. I will make use
| of my Net Yaroze and release a PS1 game one day!!!
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| A lot of what I read about Rare talks about insane
| hours/relatively high turnover in staff. Did you find that to
| be the case?
| samstave wrote:
| I went to Animation school and learned on Indigo's and O2s for
| Maya and Softimage... ~1994 -> 1996
|
| Years later when we were collapsing ILM into the new Presidio
| Campus, the amount of SGI full-rack sized machines being thrown
| into the trash was insane.
|
| I believe they turned at least one into a keg-erator...
|
| I could have had an opportunity to get one of the cabinets, but
| I didnt have a place to put it. Wish I had figured out a place
| to keep one.
|
| The SGI cases were a thing of beauty.
| mixtur2021 wrote:
| Do you mean Power Animator perhaps and not Maya? I believe
| Maya, Power Animator's successor, came later around ~1998.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| SGI was a key part of some of the most iconic early games
| (even Nintendo used them!) There isn't much of an emulation
| scene, probably because of how specialized they were, the
| weird architecture, and the diversity of workstations. And
| lots of the old machines were just tossed after they became
| obsolete. It's a huge shame from a preservation point of
| view.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous
| amounts of SGI hardware in the building.
|
| I've always been fascinated with Rareware. For such a tiny
| studio, the level of quality in the games they put out during
| that era is completely unparalleled, and many can justifiably
| still be held up as the greatest ever made.
|
| What was the secret sauce? What was it like working there? How
| was the culture?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| From Martin Hollis' wikipedia page(project head for Goldeneye
| 007):
|
| > Hollis remarked that he worked non-stop on the game,
| "[averaging] an 80 hour week over the 2 and a half years of
| the project", and that the team he recruited was very
| talented and dedicated even though most of it was composed of
| people who had never worked on video games.
|
| I guess the answer is insane levels of talent + dedication,
| and don't worry too much about domain expertise. Probably my
| favorite factoid out of there is that Goldeneye multiplayer
| was an afterthought, and basically one dude hacked it
| together in a couple of weeks at the end of the development
| cycle.
| valley_guy_12 wrote:
| As an outsider, I believe Rareware's secret sauce was a
| combination of a can-do, down-to-the-metal, fast-feedback-
| loop game development style that came from the pre-PC British
| bedroom game coders, a management team that understood how to
| manage game development and releases, and Nintendo's coaching
| on mascot development and general game polishing.
|
| Rareware's talents were big advantages in the early 3D game
| console era. But by the PS2 / Xbox era, their special skills
| didn't help as much.
|
| Today I'd say that Epic's Fortnite is the spiritual successor
| of the old Rareware.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| To continue on the similarities, Epic and Rareware also
| had/have problems with worker burnout. Pretty much every
| N64 Rareware classic drove at least a few people out of the
| company. By the time Nintendo and Microsoft got into a
| bidding war over the company there wasn't much talent left
| in it[0]. Fortnite is the same way: the fast pace of
| content churn means people are working constant overtime,
| and the perpetual nature of the game means there's no
| release that you're crunching _for_.
|
| I would disagree that this was good management, though.
| Burning out your talent is how and why game studios fall
| apart over time. Had they retained talent and kept crunch
| time low they probably would have continued churning out
| hits on the GameCube and Wii instead of stinkers on the
| Xbox. In fact, Nintendo probably understands this[1] - for
| example, when Retro Studios imploded they bought them out
| and immediately banned overtime work at the studio.
|
| [0] Microsoft _didn 't_ understand this, and this is why
| they wound up overpaying for Rare.
|
| [1] Or at least did in the Iwata era. No clue if Kimishima
| or Fukukawa have the same convictions, but given that
| Nintendo hired them both internally I imagine they do.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I would disagree that this was good management, though.
|
| well, "effective" management. Not necessarily good. Seems
| like a story that pretty much all large gen 5 (and many
| gen 6) studios share. It was this new cutting edge field
| right before/after the dotcom bubble requiring (at the
| time) very niche talent and passion. Perfect formula for
| burn and churn.
|
| This was likely one of the many thousand cuts the
| industry faced when moving to the HD era in gen 7. You
| couldn't just brute force a bunch of assets to work at
| the expected HD fidelity without stepping back and
| actually understanding what the machine is doing. You
| couldn't just have two artists doing everything for asset
| production; you needed an organized pipeline of
| specialists. You absolutely needed a
| producer/manager/director to make sure pieces are fitting
| together. Huge wakeup call for game developers on
| software/business practices most other parts of the
| industry had to employ for years.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > Rareware's talents were big advantages in the early 3D
| game console era. But by the PS2 / Xbox era, their special
| skills didn't help as much.
|
| StarFox Adventures on the Gamecube was probably their last
| "holy crap" game from a technical perspective. There wasn't
| anything else at the time, on any console, that did
| realistic-looking fur as good as that game:
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/d1/9b/69d19b00eb25ffde0f1
| d...
| paulpauper wrote:
| >The RAM on these machines were not industry standard -- they
| were proprietary, 200 pin SGI RAM modules available in 16MB,
| 64MB, or 256MB variants. The memory board (known as MC3), had
| slots for 32 memory modules -- and could handle up to 8 GB of
| RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive
| rackmount version).
|
| >Think about that for just a moment. This was the mid-1990s.
|
| Let's pose the more theoretical question of what is the most
| powerful computer that could be built if enough recourses were
| summoned to make it. We're talking a single rackmount. What about
| a rackmount the size of a city.
| vmception wrote:
| at this point its more about what metric of powerful are you
| comparing to? for example, nobody wants a liquid nitrogen
| cooled 8 gigahertz CPU any more. and measuring "flops" isn't
| that useful either. the old Silicon Graphics machines didn't
| have a single GPU in them and would not be able to render
| shaders or have/manipulate rasterized textures of basically any
| resolution, they just threw a lot of energy at a problem for a
| now-antiquated and useless approach to that problem.
|
| and finally, if you make something with a bunch custom chips
| with a bunch of pins with high bandwidth, then you don't have
| another metric to compare to something else.
|
| I'm open to the thought exercise but I can predict which
| directions the conversation would go, I'm just content with the
| variety of metrics on CPUmark these days.
| [deleted]
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Not possible because it could not be a single computer node.
| Electrical signals simply are too slow.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| SGI was building these enormous supercomputers with the NUMA
| architecture, kind of like a cluster of super fast units with
| fast interconnects and a OS and support software so you could
| actually use it. This is one of the less photogenic setups:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altix#/media/File%3AUs-nasa-co...
|
| If you can make your problem fit the architecture you can work
| on enormous tasks. It wasn't bad stuff at all but probably
| impossible to make money on. Commodity hardware improved so
| fast they couldn't keep up.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| I would imagine it'd be similar in architecture to existing
| supercomputers: many identical compute units connected over a
| network. Scaling a single rackmount computer design up to the
| size of a city would not be practical, a network would have to
| be included at some point to keep scaling adequately.
| lostcolony wrote:
| A bit random, but, the guy on the left must have been nodding or
| something, and the camera being used had a slow shutter speed. I
| did a double take in seeing two mouths.
| mepian wrote:
| I'm glad the middle screen is explained, Symbolics always gets
| overshadowed by SGI. If you want to see it in action, watch this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU
| opentokix wrote:
| Windows NT4 and 3DS MAX R1 was releasted in 1996.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| Oh this post brought back so many fun memories of college days
| playing Flight Simulator on SGI boxes in the computer lab. Having
| used IRIX on SGI Indy, Windows 3.1 on PCs seemed like a toy.
| efficax wrote:
| There used to be such a wonderful diversity of architectures,
| operating systems and platforms in comparison to today's boring
| landscape of really only 3 end user platforms and basically 2
| viable server environments. Alas, i miss the old days
| justinator wrote:
| Hard question to ask, but what was the workflow used in
| development? Two programmers sitting at many monitors powered by
| x different workstations, and a monitor. What are they all doing,
| say: here?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| They were probably posing for a photo there. Pair programming
| wasn't coined as a term or popularized by Kent Beck until the
| early 2000s and 'Extreme Programming'.
| p_l wrote:
| Extreme Programming seemed to be en vogue among the early
| adopters that led to "agile manifesto" in late 1990s.
|
| That said, it looks like somewhat typical case of discussing
| a bit of design, with main artist sitting at the workstation,
| while the other person came from elsewhere.
| aasasd wrote:
| Forget the machines: I'm vaguely impressed by the controllers
| with lots of weird buttons, with analog knobs, and I think with
| some LCD screens--casually sitting before the monitors. These
| days every home video editor can buy such things--but were people
| doing much video editing in '96? Wonder how many of them were
| sold in a year.
| habibur wrote:
| Also there was a Final Fantasy film produced at that time that
| took 1000 workstations, 200 persons and 4 years to render at a
| cost of $100m+. Thought it made only $80m.
| efsavage wrote:
| And despite all that, by the time it was released, it was
| really not very impressive graphically, which was all it had
| going for it since it was a terrible film.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Yeah the faces were alright for the time, but everything else
| wasn't great. The environments in particular were pretty bad.
| The opening scenes of the movie have the characters flying
| through a burnt out wasteland and it really, effectively
| looks like a 16x16 texture has been draped over several
| square kilometers of mountains. Texture filtered, so no giant
| chunky pixels, but it still looked awful. Absolutely no
| detail. And this was one of the first things you saw in the
| movie!
|
| Also it was just dreadfully boring, which is basically the
| worst thing a piece of entertainment can be, even worse than
| the visuals.
| latortuga wrote:
| Amen! As a FF fan in the 90s, I was so incredibly hyped
| about this movie. I remember it major getting press in
| gaming magazines and going to it with my cousin. I also
| fondly remember it as the only movie I've ever walked out
| of.
| guenthert wrote:
| At the time of release, they were quite proud of the
| animation of hair I remember.
|
| I thought actually the film was alright, if you're into
| such spiritual things. But I can see, that it didn't appeal
| to the video gaming crowd.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| I could see what they were going for. A lot of the pieces
| of good or functional ideas and hooks are there: the
| central mystery of why there are all these ghostly
| creatures everywhere, trying to solve this mystery before
| it's too late, the uneasy alliance between the scientists
| and the military where both are trying to solve the
| problem both have different ideas about how to do it but
| both need resources from the other, trying to convenience
| other of things you know are true but are difficult to
| understand or sound crazy, trying to have functional and
| healthy relationships in a crumbling world, etc. There is
| a lot there that could work and a lot of media has
| similar themes and plot points, it's just the film
| doesn't do a very good job of it. It's not even really
| worth a watch to see "it's so bad it's good" or "let's
| see and laugh at Square's hundred million dollar mistake"
| because as I said it's just kind of mediocre and boring.
| neogodless wrote:
| Released in 2001 after a budget of $137m, and $85m revenue.
|
| https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spir...
|
| > The movie was created using a 3D CG tool called MAYA as well
| as original tools created in Honolulu.
|
| > By the time the final shots were rendered some of the earlier
| ones had to be redone because they did not match anymore. Also,
| the software used to create them had become more advanced (and
| hence more detail was possible).
| bitwize wrote:
| In the video game I'm writing, I made the enemy computers blue
| and purple in color -- as a tribute to SGI in the era when it
| seemed RISC architecture really was gonna change everything.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| RISC did change everything - the primary computing device of
| users are ARM-based phones. Dependent on x86 servers in the
| cloud for much though.
|
| Of course it's arguable how RISCy ARM really is, but x86 is the
| only CISC left for non-embedded computing anymore, and really
| A) it's a hybrid with SIMD and a lot of recent instructions,
| and B) I the ISA is essentially internally virtualized atop a
| microarchitecture which operates vastly differently than the
| ISA - all the wacky stuff done for performance is tucked away
| there until it rears its head with Spectre-like issues and
| such.
|
| Further, couldn't it be said that RISC changed Intel? - one
| wonders what Intel would have done had RISC not been making
| gains in the 90's against Intel.
| p_l wrote:
| Microcoded CISC has been state of art method to implementing
| CISC cpus since ... 1960s?
|
| The one x86 that actually had a RISC core inside was AMD K5,
| which essentially used 29050 core with an x86 frontend
| slapped on it (in great simplification). Am29k architecture
| is still used and produced by Honeywell for their avionics
| systems.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I'm astonished by the amount of money Squaresoft was investing in
| game development at the time. Obviously, it paid off big time for
| them, but I can't imagine they realized the game would be as
| successful as it was. If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it
| seem like they never understood why the game was a success.
| endorphine wrote:
| > If I'm honest, their follow-ups make it seem like they never
| understood why the game was a success.
|
| This sounds like a pretty simplistic reasoning to me. Do you
| really believe this?
|
| The fact that your follow up game (or
| movie/book/album/painting) wasn't as successful as the previous
| one, doesn't mean you don't understand why the latter was a
| success. Understanding success and replicating it are two
| different things.
|
| Btw, I like FFVIII more than FFVII.
| toto444 wrote:
| Would you say you know why it was a success? This game has had
| a massive impact on me and I am spending a lot of time trying
| to understand why (along with FF6 and Chrono Trigger). I have
| identified 3 things : the music plays a massive role, the way
| emotion are conveyed using by the posture of the characters as
| well and finally the story telling that mixes stories and
| battles and that can hardly be recreated using an other medium.
|
| Typing this I realise that does not explain why the follow-ups
| were not as good.
| Nition wrote:
| A lot of us had never really played an RPG before, especially
| if we never had an SNES. Most games had a generic poorly-
| written story that might be a page in the manual instead of
| even being in the game itself.
|
| Then suddenly a game comes along on the popular console, and
| everyone's playing it and talking about it, and it puts you
| in this 3D living world, and a real story is happening with
| real characters, with real conversations - there's even
| _swear words_ in it! It 's treating me like an adult! - and
| yes the music is beautiful too, and the whole thing seems
| impossibly huge, the world seems to go on forever and now I
| can fly? And now I can go under the ocean? There was nothing
| else like it, not on a mainstream console anyway.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > Would you say you know why it was a success?
|
| Oh, no. But I can say that the game is still objectively
| incredible. I recently did a full play through of the Steam
| version with the 7th Heaven upgrades, and enjoyed every
| minute of it. And I don't think it's all nostalgia either.
|
| And yes, the music is incredible, as evidence by the fact
| that the Shin-Ra Orchestra still tours.
| rkk3 wrote:
| Chrono Trigger!
| amelius wrote:
| What happened to SGI?
| vondur wrote:
| Linux PC's with bandwidth better than propietary Unix systems,
| and video cards from Nvidia/ATI.
| philipkglass wrote:
| They made most of their money on expensive hardware. Their
| workstation market was killed by Windows NT and OS X (later
| Linux too) running on mass-market CPUs once graphics
| accelerator boards became good enough. Their server market was
| killed by Windows and Linux running on mass-market CPUs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#Decline
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| SGI's days were numbered as soon as 3D accelerator cards for
| PCs became a thing.
| l1k wrote:
| Filed chapter 11 twice.
|
| Bad management made the wrong bet, thought Itanium and Windows
| would take over the world.
|
| But what really broke all UNIX workstation manufacturers' backs
| was the unwillingness to cannibalize their products with
| affordable machines. SGI workstations were not affordable to
| students, so they got x86 machines instead and installed Linux.
| Google was built with x86-based Linux boxes because that's what
| the founders were using and could afford. UNIX workstation
| manufacturers lost an entire generation of young engineers that
| way. Apple eventually offered what they should have: Sleek,
| affordable machines with a rock-solid UNIX underneath a
| polished UI.
| cartoonfoxes wrote:
| I think it was 2001? that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)
| replaced their SGI workstations with linux boxes running
| RedHat 7.5 and powered by a Nvidia Quadro2 gpu.
| samstave wrote:
| That and in ~2004, ILM, along with the other LucasFilm and
| Games --> Lucas Presidio... during which a lot of SGI
| machines were scrapped.
|
| Source: I was the designer of the datacenter and network
| cabling infra for the Presidio.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is why some people are so excited about RISC-V, BTW -
| they're re-enacting the exact same market play as x86 did
| back then. Starting out from low-end hardware only good for
| single-purpose use (we call that "embedded" these days) and
| scaling up to something that can run a proper OS, with MMU
| and virtual memory support. And doing it while beating
| everyone else on price, as well as potentially on
| performance.
| cartoonfoxes wrote:
| Bankrupt (2006), acquired by Rackable Systems (2009), then
| aquired by HP Enterprise (2016).
| p_l wrote:
| Rackable did horrible things with the brand.
|
| I believe HPE essentially continued only the UltraViolet
| series (The Xeon-based continuation of Altix series)
| harel wrote:
| I received a demo of a $250k SGI when I was about 14 (1990). It
| powered a military F16 flight simulator and the experience was
| nothing short of mind blowing. Those machines were tightly packed
| magic.
| samstave wrote:
| When I was in Civil Air Patrl, we went to Fallon Naval
| Airstation in Nevada, when they were still doing Top Gun there.
|
| The flight review theatre was AMAZING, it had a huge screen,
| and the graphics were 3D wireframe - but they had the entire
| valley modeled and had a huge trackball and they could review
| the flight scenes in 3D -- this was ~1988/89
|
| It was amazing... but I am not sure if it was backed by SGI,
| but based on your comment, I believe it would have been.
|
| ---
|
| I bought one of the early OpenGL capable graphics cards frm
| Evans and Sutherland in ~1997 to run Softimage on Windows NT
| with a Dual PII 266 based machine...
|
| The card had 32MB of graphic ram. it cost me $1,699 -- and it
| was a full length AT board.
|
| I was trying to get an O2 -- but it was way out of my price
| range.
| usefulcat wrote:
| My first job out of college was implementing the image
| generator for the simulator for the landing signal officer
| (LSO) on the USS Nimitz.
|
| It ran on an 8 CPU SGI Onyx that was about the size of a
| refrigerator. The view was from the position of the LSO, at the
| aft end of the carrier deck. In the actual installation, the
| images were projected onto curved screens giving a 270 degree
| FOV. I do wish I could have seen the final product!
| esaym wrote:
| You were 14 and got $250k worth of hardware to demo? You got
| some explaining to do... (please)
| p_l wrote:
| "Demo" can mean a lot of things. Getting hands on a VIP pass
| at an airshow meant I received, as an 8 year old, a rather
| comprehensive demo... _of JAS-39 Gripen multirole fighter
| jet_. Just the seat I sat for half an hour cost $250k.
|
| Sometimes you can get yourself into really interesting places
| :)
| harel wrote:
| Sorry, I've posted this before so always feel like blabbering
| if I repeat - but here goes - I was 14, my dad had a print
| business and printed all the cockpit panels for a private
| company developing an F16 simulator for the Israeli air
| force. He took me to their offices one weekend. The setup was
| a full 180 degree screen projections, a realistics 1:1 F16
| cockpit with all the panels and buttons etc, and a SGI
| running the show. They gave me the spinning Beatle car demo,
| and then sat me down to fly. That day left a hard imprint
| (including the price tag on the SGI which they were proud to
| mention). I was an Amiga kid, and to top it all off, the
| other room had what seemed like hundreds of Amigas, which
| were used to build 3D models for the simultaor.
| neogodless wrote:
| They said they received a demo. That is to say they were
| among people who got a few minutes to witness the $250k worth
| of hardware in action.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I remember that flight simulator demo, it was something you'd
| find at events and trade shows or even super fancy arcades.
| This was back in the first VR 'boom' and tail end of the era
| of arcades. Some companies used SGI and similar powerful
| workstations to build simulator game pods, like for
| mechwarrior and spacecraft racing games. People would pay for
| a 5-10 minute session in one.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Ah yes, good ol' SGI, it always brings a smile to my face reading
| these old war stories.
|
| I wish we could get some insight on the development of the first
| successful 3D game on PC, Quake by I'd software as there's a
| famous picture of John Carmack sitting in front of some SGI
| workstation with a monitor with a resolution ox 1920*1080( in
| 1995!)
|
| Also, SGI powered most VFX Studios of that era, so many great
| movies went through those machines before ending up on the big
| screen.
|
| It's insane how quickly 3dfx, Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer
| hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely obsolete
| within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a blast.
|
| But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and
| brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best
| industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or black
| square boxes.
|
| [1]
| https://preview.redd.it/tt3ziuwt98o31.jpg?auto=webp&s=e5cc61...
| MisterTea wrote:
| > But still, I'm sad to see SGI go, as their funky shaped and
| brightly colored workstations and monitors had the best
| industrial design[1] in an era of depressing beige, grey or
| black square boxes.
|
| This is what I miss most about the 90's and proprietary
| computer vendors: the exotic fun looking cases they had vs
| boring beige Mac and PC cases.
|
| I have an SGI 230 which was a last ditch effort to stay
| relevant via offering a regular x86 machine in an ATX SGI case.
| Unfortunately SGI ditched the snazzy cube logo sy then so it
| only has the lame fisher price sgi logo stenciled on it. It now
| houses a 12 core threadripper running Void Musl.
|
| Before that workstation, the 320 and 540 used Intel P3/Xeon
| chips on proprietary motherboards, 3D GPU/chip-set and even
| proprietary ram modules. Only ran nt4 and was a miserable
| failure of a machine.
| aftbit wrote:
| Why Void? And why Void musl?
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Love those designs as the colors are now a direct
| representation of the 90s.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Just curious what are the state of arts graphic workstations
| nowadays? Mac pro?
| walrus01 wrote:
| really, really beefy dual socket xeon probably, or amd epyc,
| with 2TB+ RAM
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Got it. I Google around and surprised to find vendors who
| basically build workstations from market components. Not
| sure whether they are mainstream though.
| Certified wrote:
| Surprisingly, because most CAD and computer graphics
| programs are still largely not optimized for multi-threaded
| processors, the fastest workstations are typically using
| whatever processor tops the single core compute performance
| category, not the multicore. They are then paired with as
| much ram as the chipset supports. Also, when you are
| talking about pro graphics cards like Radeon Pro and the
| RTX A (formerly called quadro) lines, it only pays to
| upgrade to the next gen graphics card once your software
| vendor has had a year or two to integrate with a new
| hardware gen's capabilities. The pro gfx card market (at
| least when it pertains to OpenGL performance) is one area
| that will actually punish you for being too early an
| adopter, which is disappointing when cards go for several
| thousands of dollars new. The whole area of CG software has
| been stagnating for 5 years while OpenGL driver
| improvements have fallen out of favor for more bare metal
| processing approaches that are only now getting to feature
| parody and developer adoption like vulkan. Hopefully the
| next few years brings a positive trend in CG price to
| performance again as these new architectures actually start
| shipping in CG software products. As someone who works
| daily in CAD, the performance stagnation over the last 5-10
| years has been depressing to say the least.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks. This is totally new to me. I guess it's the same
| pic for professional level designers or game designers
| who basically work in a CAD like environment? For example
| the people who design levels and scripts for games such
| as Skyrim.
| blevin wrote:
| Feature parody is such a good turn of phrase.
| pengaru wrote:
| > It's insane how quickly Nvidia and Intel X86 consumer
| hardware made SGI workstations overpriced and completely
| obsolete within the span of just a few years. The '90's were a
| blast.
|
| Let's at least give _some_ credit to 3dfx Interactive for PCs
| dethroning the 3D giants. There was a time practically everyone
| playing Quake had a Voodoo card.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Voodoo 2 ftw
| [deleted]
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Pretty much.
|
| With the advent of semi fabs like TSMC, STM, etc. making
| their processes more accessible to smaller fabless companies,
| 3dfx, PowerVR, ATI, Nvidia and other startups in the 3D space
| back then, realized they can replace all those expensive
| discrete RISC chips SGI was using for their massive 'reality
| engine' PCBs, and instead design a cheaper and more efficient
| custom ASIC from the ground up that does nearly the same
| things SGI's reality engine was doing (triangle rendering and
| texture mapping was enough for a PC 3D accelerator back
| then), but at 1/100th of the price, and sell it to consumers.
|
| Fast forward, and we all know how the story played out and
| where the industry is today.
|
| _> There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a
| Voodoo card._
|
| Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then,
| plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was
| wild as hell.[1]
|
| Even the box-art on their GPU boxes was the most memorable of
| any HW of that era. Anyone remember those eye glaring down on
| you from the store shelves?[2] I feel like this is now a lost
| art.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I
|
| [2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkiRZhLW0AQzR7g.jpg
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > realized they can replace all those expensive discrete
| RISC chips SGI was using for their 'reality engines', and
| instead design a custom ASIC from the ground up that does
| nearly the same things SGI's workstations were doing
|
| This one. It is amazing seeing how some monstruosity of a
| full-length, full-heigth cards were replaced by,
| essentially, a single chip solutions. I would recommend
| something akin to a computer museum to see exactly how it
| came to be.
|
| On mobile ATM, if someone is interested - leave a reply, I
| would provide some links on the most interesting ones.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It is amazing seeing how some monstruosity of a full-
| length, full-heigth cards were replaced by, essentially,
| a single chip solutions._
|
| Yeah, I'm surprised SGI didn't see the tides turning as
| the ground shifted beneath them and the rest of the
| industry leapfrogged them.
|
| But that's what made SV great, young visionary companies
| could come out of nowhere and eat the lunch of old
| dinosaurs who lacked the vision.
| jandrese wrote:
| I did a stint as a co-op for SGI back in the late 90s.
| What was clear at the time was that there was a flight of
| the smart people out to the early PC graphics card
| industry causing serious brain drain in the company. This
| was also the time the company was making astoundingly
| overpriced PCs that made the bad bet on RAMBUS.
|
| The reality is the company suffered from the same
| fundamental market forces that killed off most of the
| Workstation market in the 90s. No niche company could
| spend what Intel was spending on R&D every year so their
| performance advantage was continually eroding, while the
| price points for the hardware were not. Trying to
| transition to being a PC manufacturer wasn't totally
| crazy, but it would mean competing a highly price
| competitive market which SGI was absolutely not equipped
| to do.
|
| I had the impression that the smart people in the
| graphics department saw that management was never going
| to go along with their "lets build far cheaper and better
| versions of our existing products on a PCI card that you
| can stuff in a cheap off the shelf PC" that would
| massively undercut the core business. So they quit the
| company and started nVidia.
| linspace wrote:
| > that would massively undercut the core business
|
| This happens a lot of times. The reality is that someone
| will do it for you. Sometimes they even grow bigger than
| you.
| npunt wrote:
| Even Intel flirted with RAMBUS and paid for it. When I
| was at Pandemic Studios in 99-02, we'd get lots of
| prototype hardware from Intel and they sent us PIII's
| with the RAMBUS-exclusive i820 chipset. The things were
| impossible to get working stably and the RDRAM was
| ludicrously expensive. Total dead end from the get-go,
| and slower than AMD's stuff.
|
| Intel was really on a dumb path starting in the late 90s,
| with RAMBUS, Itanium, the P4 debacle, and missing the
| emerging mobile market, and didn't right themselves until
| 2006 with the Core series. But they were big enough to be
| able to make a few mistakes unlike SGI.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> there was a flight of the smart people out to the
| early PC graphics card industry causing serious brain
| drain in the company_
|
| Yeah, I can imagine you could count on the fingers of
| your hands, the number of people could, back then, design
| 3D acceleration hardware, so it must have been a pretty
| exclusive club in the Bay Area at the time where everyone
| in this field knew each other, I can only assume.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > 3dfx came with their Glide API
|
| As a teenager/young adult in the late 90s/early 00s, I was
| so glad to see 3dfx fail. I hated how popular the Glide API
| was since you could only run it on a 3dfx card. I had asked
| for a 3dfx Voodoo for Christmas one year, and my dad got me
| a Rendition Verite 2200. It supposedly had better
| performance than a Voodoo while having a lower price, but
| it couldn't run Glide, so couldn't play half the games I
| wanted a Voodoo for.
|
| I didn't want to feel ungrateful to my dad, so my
| frustration got targeted to 3dfx for making a proprietary
| API when OpenGL and Direct3D existed.
|
| I eventually got a Voodoo Banshee, but by that time Glide
| was falling out of favor.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> my frustration got targeted to 3dfx for making a
| proprietary API when OpenGL and Direct3D existed_
|
| Do you happen to know a fruity HW company that today runs
| it's own proprietary graphics API when the open Vulkan or
| OpenGL exist? /s
|
| All jokes aside, back then it made sense why every 3D HW
| company was baking their own API. It wasn't just for
| gatekeeping/rent seeking, but the consumer 3D graphics
| acceleration business was brand new, there was no
| standardization, so nobody knew where the future was
| heading, so they wanted to have full control over it as
| they built it. Plus, they were shipping hardware before
| Microsoft had come up with DirectX so they needed some
| API until then, and I assume they were afraid to touch
| OpenGL, the API of their biggest competitor.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Do you happen to know a fruity HW company that today
| runs it's own proprietary graphics API when the open
| Vulkan or OpenGL exist? /s
|
| Yeah, but how many AAA games use it exclusively? Every
| AAA game I know of is either using Vulkan, OpenGL, or
| DirectX directly, or they're using a game engine like
| Unity or Unreal and abstracting away the graphics API.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| To be honest, I can't think of anything that's actually
| exclusive to the fruity company's graphics API? I mean,
| they have no game market to begin with.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Is Metal any more proprietary than Direct3D?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Direct3D has alternate implementations as part of Proton.
| Is there anything like that for Metal?
| pjmlp wrote:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/genre/ios-games/id6014
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| I'm sure at least 99% of those use an opengl-metal
| translation layer
| agumonkey wrote:
| > There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a
| Voodoo card.
|
| those who had a voodoo + those who wanted to have one = 100%
| samstave wrote:
| Fun fact, the O2 had an 'optional' expansion port that was an
| additional ~$1,000 or so... but the thing is, ALL the O2s had
| this port - it was that if you paid for it, they popped the
| plastic cover off the case to reveal the port...
| bri3d wrote:
| I'm not so sure about this, I've owned a lot of O2s.
|
| The only blocking plates on the rear cover of an O2 usually
| cover the spot where the Flat Panel Adapter or Dual Monitor
| board goes, and it's not installed by default, or the spot
| where a PCI card would go, which, well, it's a PCI card.
| p_l wrote:
| Which expansion port are you talking about?
| samstave wrote:
| I cant recall what the port was... A serial port? I cant
| recall - but just that it was on all O2s and it was just
| knocking out the plastic cover to get access to it.
| spitfire wrote:
| One of the video ports. I think digital video port.
|
| The base model supported audio and "moose cam" (A webcam,
| in 1996!). If you paid extra you got video.
| bri3d wrote:
| Oh, this was the SDI hack, but it needed a separate port
| expander - it was more involved than just removing a
| plate.
|
| You could buy the base AV1 "analog" video I/O card and
| then plug an SDI expansion breakout board (I think the
| Miranda VIVO was the most popular) into the webcam port,
| instead of buying the much more expensive AV2 "digital"
| video I/O card.
| p_l wrote:
| There were two video options you could buy, with analog
| and digital versions, plus there were special parts to
| provide alternative options for display outs (by default
| it had sgi-style 13W3 only)
| jl6 wrote:
| I recall CRT monitors were capable of some quite high
| resolutions (often with a compromise to refresh rate), and it
| took a while for LCD panels to overtake them.
| bityard wrote:
| CRTs, being analog, are theoretically capable of _any_
| resolution. But in practice, most monitors were limited to
| between a few to a few dozen common modes. Toward the end of
| the CRT monitor's reign, most monitors could display higher
| resolutions than was really practical for their size, as the
| physical limit is the size of the "dots" that make up the
| phosphor layer. (Which is probably not at all the right
| terminology, because I'm not a CRT geek.)
|
| The refresh rate compromise at higher resolutions was due to
| the limitations of the graphics card, NOT the monitor.
|
| LCDs took a little while to catch up for a few reasons:
|
| 1) expense! It was hard and expensive to manufacture a
| display containing millions of transistors with an acceptable
| (read: profitable) failure rate.
|
| 2) colors! LCDs had a reputation for extremely poor color
| quality in the beginning. Blacks were medium gray at best and
| primary colors all looked washed out. Today's LCDs still have
| a hard time getting to "true black."
|
| 3) ghosting! Early LCDs had poor response times. Move your
| mouse cursor and watch it leave a trail across your screen.
| Fine for word processing and spreadsheets. Terrible for
| games.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >as the physical limit is the size of the "dots" that make
| up the phosphor layer.
|
| Another physical limit was the weight of the glass. The
| larger the display, the glass got thicker and thicker to
| "lens" the beam correctly so the edges/corners were
| straight. We had a Sony reference CRT for our film
| transfer/color correction suite that was a 32" HD monitor.
| MSRP was >$30k for it. (Sony's reference monitors were
| roughly $1k per inch in pricing.) The thing was stupid
| heavy requiring a minimum of 2 people if their names were
| Arnie; otherwise it'd take at least 3 maybe 4 typical post
| house employees. All of the weight was in the front.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the CRT had no frequency limit ?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Of course they did, the scan rate of the electron guns
| would be limited at some point. What that limit is I
| don't know but it was certainly finite.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder which component who limit first.. the gun or the
| flyback driver.
| wtallis wrote:
| CRTs had limits on how quickly the beam could scan across
| a line (and return to the other side of the screen for
| the next line), which imposed a tradeoff between the
| number of lines per frame and the number of frames per
| second. Within a line, the number of pixels per line was
| often limited either by the speed of the graphics card's
| DAC or the analog bandwidth of the VGA cable. But
| sometimes it wasn't, and you could take a monitor
| originally intended for something like 1280x1024 and get
| it to display 1920x1080 with acceptable sharpness, after
| adjusting the picture height to compensate for the
| changed aspect ratio.
| zbuf wrote:
| It certainly took a long time (mid 2010s) for panels in their
| various guises to truly overtake CRTs for film work. The
| reason given at my workplace was the calibration control of
| CRTs took time to be superceded.
|
| The Sony 21" CRTs (and 24" in widscreen) had a very good run
| -- spanning several decades. They were certainly capable of
| higher resolutions, but the 1600x1200 was pretty much a
| standard (or 1920x1200 on the 24" widescreen) for that entire
| run. I can't think of any other desktop workstation
| performance 'metric' that was stationary for so long.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| I miss my Sony Trinitron that I gave away in 2015. I
| remember not having an "HD TV" when I first bought a PS3,
| so I hooked it up to my Trinitron with component cables and
| it displayed beautifully. The 1080p TV I bought at a later
| date felt like a downgrade, despite the larger size.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| 1600x1200 is 1.92mp, while 1920x1080 is 2.07mp.
| Technically more pixels, but juuust barely. For quite a
| few years my setup was a 1080p panel next to an aged
| ColorSync 20" and the difference was mostly the falloff
| in the corners of the CRT. (And the incredible weight of
| the CRT, of course. 78 pounds!)
| paulpauper wrote:
| I read that CRTs are still better in some respects
| ridgered4 wrote:
| Input latency, flexibility of native resolution (they don't
| really have one). It's been awhile since I've looked at
| them side by side, but I think they're still better on
| black levels. I suspect color reproduction has caught up
| though.
|
| It's not surprising they fell out of favor though. Once the
| ghosting stopped being absolutely horrendous the LCD is
| just superior for office work. Uses less power, saves tons
| of desk space (and due to less weight, doesn't need a
| strong desk) and no flickering means a cheapo LCD is
| probably easier on the eyes than a cheapo CRT.
|
| I bet the CRT wwould still be used more often if the supply
| chain to make them didn't fall apart when the demand
| disappeared.
| dylan604 wrote:
| For giving you cancer!
|
| When Sony first brought out their OLED reference monitors
| to the market, they had a demo at NAB to demonstrate the
| various screen types. All of the monitors were the
| equivalent reference version of that series: CRT, LCD,
| OLED.
|
| It was an interesting demo as they had the same feed going
| to each monitor. When showing how each monitor could
| display black, the OLED looked like it was off, the LCD was
| just a faint shade of gray, while the CRT was much much
| more noticeably not black from its glowing screen. I
| started to think to myself how they might be pushing the
| brightness on the CRT to make it look bad against the
| others. Right as I was thinking that to myself, the
| narrator said something to address this thought and then
| displayed bars. All 3 monitors were correctly adjusted. A
| gamed CRT with brightness adjusted would have been obvious
| at this point to those knowing how the test pattern is
| meant to look.
|
| The only thing I'd suggest that a CRT looks better is on
| true interlaced content.
| bluedino wrote:
| It was an Intergraph monitor, connected to an Integraph
| workstation. Carmack didn't use SGI's for development but they
| did use their servers for level processing
| [deleted]
| walrus01 wrote:
| as I recall the SGI monitors were actually the pinnacle of Sony
| Trinitron CRT tech, rebadged, and connected using a 13W3 analog
| video link. Similar to the very high end Sun at the time. As
| neither SGI or Sun actually made CRTs, they went with the state
| of the art from the world's top CRT maker. Might have been some
| mitsubishi diamondtron in there too.
|
| In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese model TVs
| but I am not sure about _monitors_ , might have been more like
| a 4:3 1600x1200 display.
| Melatonic wrote:
| You could also "overclock" them to run at higher refresh
| rates (frame rates, hz) depending on the resolution. The top
| CRT's were blowing away LCD's for many, many years. Good
| color, higher refresh, good dynamic range, etc etc. Those 21"
| CRT's were massive but I held onto my second hand one for as
| long as I could. I remember getting the VGA adapter for the
| Dreamcast and it looked damn good on that CRT!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Driving CRTs at bad frequencies was a common way of letting
| all the magic smoke out, back in the day.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I still remember buying a dirt cheap SGI monitor back in the
| day. But it took a while before I figured out how to mod the
| cable because of sync on green.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, component cables with 5 BNCs RGB+Hsync+Vsync. Good
| times!!
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Fixed Frequency, crafting an X mode line on a cheap 14",
| no text readable during boot, fingers crossed if X came
| up ok, if not, swap monitors, boot with "init=/bin/bash"
| and goto 1...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> In 1995 I think there were 16:9 aspect ratio japanese
| model TVs but I am not sure about monitors, might have been
| more like a 4:3 1600x1200 display_
|
| Nope, it was definitely 16:9, but I was mistaken, it was an
| Intergraph[1], not SGI like I originally thought, but still
| connected to an SGI workstation.
|
| Just look at this beast[1]. Also, the monitor is in the photo
| as well :)
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/gxvm99/legend
| ary...
| walrus01 wrote:
| I can't even imagine what that might have cost, it was
| probably sold for high-end CAD and similar...
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's a semi-easy way to spot a Trinitron if you knew
| where/how to look for the tell. There were 2 horizontal lines
| that were shadows from some bit of wiring that could be seen
| when viewing the screen when certain images/patterns like
| solid colors were displayed.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| There's an even easier way on older Trinitrons - the bulge
| of the glass is different.
|
| Notice how the left and right sides of the glass are
| straight vertical lines, and only the top and bottom edges
| are curved: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consumer-
| electronics-hall-of-f...
|
| Versus a standard CRT, where all four sides are curved:
| https://fineartamerica.com/featured/vintage-tv-scott-
| chimber...
|
| Of course, the final-gen Trinitons (circa 2000 onward) had
| truly flat glass, so there was no tell-tale curvature to
| look for.
|
| And once Sony's patents started expiring, there were
| competitors like Mitsubishi's Diamondtron displays with
| glass shaped like Trinitrons. I'm not sure if they had the
| two horizontal lines like Trinitrons.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| I had a Sun workstation with a beast of a 19" Trinitron CRT
| in the late '90s in my apartment (working remotely for a
| California startup) and remember it fondly. The lines
| you're referring to are called "damping wires" in this
| article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
| valley_guy_12 wrote:
| I remember that shadow! FWIW it was just one line in
| smaller Trinitrons, and it was located 1/3rd of the way
| from the top or bottom edge rather than in the middle.
|
| Apple mounted the Trinitron tube upside down compared to
| other vendors, so that the faint horizontal line would be
| in the bottom third of the screen rather than the top
| third.
| midnightclubbed wrote:
| The SGI monitors were 4:3 but I don't recall the resolution.
| I do recall that they were beasts, weight of a small elephant
| and a not dissimilar size - you needed to pull your desk away
| from the wall to get any kind of distance to the screen.
|
| Over time their timings would drift and you could never get
| the entire screen completely sharp.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| I just finally gave away a 17" Trinitron SGI monitor when
| cleaning my office.
|
| That thing was a tank! I bought it at a CG house bankruptcy
| sale in the 90s for $2k, which was less than half the going
| price at the time.
|
| But you're right, it weighed a ton. It did need periodic
| degaussing. And when a communication company half a mile
| away put in some satellite uplinks, I could see when there
| was heavy communication traffic by a slight color shift on
| one side.
| cfn wrote:
| And there was a button you could press to "de-magnetize"
| the screen which made this awesome noise!
| AyyWS wrote:
| Like this?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAnvHq_aFE
| throwanem wrote:
| Degaussing buttons were common on high-end CRT displays.
| They were always that fun!
|
| In the mid-2000s, I worked at a place where we had
| several "decommissioned" Indys living a second life as
| Apache servers for some of our hosting clients - not
| uncommon in those days. We had one of the big 19" 4:3
| CRTs on a KVM, too, and its weight put a noticeable if
| graceful curve in the MDF desktop on which it stood.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Degaussing. Most(all?) CRT monitors could do that.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjO2vVaxIWM
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm still stumped by nvidia rise and how gaming propelled them
| into HPC/Supercomputing. Who knew playing video games who
| amplify research that much ?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Simple.
|
| Rendering 3D graphics for games and the supercomputing used
| by AI/ML/research both need the same thing: Embarrassingly
| parallel math calculations with little or no branching in the
| code.
|
| For example, a feed-forward neural network is just a whole
| lot of multiplication and addition. Transforming a 3D vertex
| in space to a 2D screen coordinate is matrix multiplication,
| which is just a whole lot of multiplication and addition. If
| you've already designed silicon to perform those operations
| in a single clock cycle, making it do HPC/SC rather than
| gaming isn't that big of a switch.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Aight but then why no other company managed to compete on
| the numerical core array ? still funny, as if the wealthy
| gaming market funded nvidia venture into serious computing
| enough to choke the potential competition.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Silicon is expensive to design, and even more expensive
| to build. The startup costs are crazy high. By the time
| people realized it could be a thing, nVidia and AMD
| already owned the market.
| jandrese wrote:
| You need huge money to develop the tech, but the HPC
| industry is tiny. People are always impressed at these
| million dollar machines, but only a handful are built
| every year. There is a lot more money in gaming selling
| millions of $200-$1000 cards every year.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Neural networks have non-linearities. There were hacks for
| doing some sort of general purpose computation using the
| GPU fixed rendering pipeline, but they're not enough for
| neural networks especially as understood today. You need
| general shaders, which were a relatively late development.
| dylan604 wrote:
| every single teenager whose parental units asked where gaming
| skills would come into use later in life as an adult. at
| least the were hoping for something like that.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I bet zero 90s teenager said "mooom, how do you expect to
| cure cancer if you stop me from buying nv chips ?? how ?"
| dylan604 wrote:
| I bet I can stack boxes in a truck better than any pre-
| Tetris playing person before me!
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I'm still stumped by nvidia rise and how gaming propelled
| them into HPC/Supercomputing. Who knew playing video games
| who amplify research that much ?_
|
| Jensen Huang did. When people think of tech visionaries they
| think of Jobs or Musk, but Huang is just as great. He's been
| bang on the money on the future of this industry since he
| founded Nvidia, which is how they managed to not just
| consistently stay ahead of their competition (ATI) or put
| them out of business (3dfx), but leapfrog them (AMD) by
| branching in several fields (AI/ML, PhysX, computer vision,
| self driving, compute etc.) He saw early on that GPUs should
| push into general-compute and not just be for video games,
| and he executed well on that.
|
| There are interviews on Youtube with Huang at Standford IIRC,
| where he discusses his vision of the GPU industry from the
| early days of Nvidia. Check them out, the guy's not your
| typical CEO suit focused on the share price, but he's
| basically a tech genius.
|
| So, to answer your other question about why only Nvidia
| manage to win compute and not the other GPU companies, it's
| simple. Huang had the vision for the entire ecosystem from
| GPU chips, to drivers, to APIs and SW libraries, to
| partnerships and cooperation with the people and the
| companies who will use them. Building great GPUs for compute
| is not enough if you're just gonna throw them on the market
| without the ecosystem and support behind them, and expect it
| to be a success. That's what Nvidia gets and the rest
| (AMD/Intel) don't. So while ATI/AMD had tunnel vision and was
| focused only on building gaming chips, Huang was busy
| building a complete GPU-compute ecosystem for their gaming
| chips with the rest of the industry.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Not to take anything from what you've said because Huang is
| really all that and more. Find his interview with Morris
| Chang to get some more insight. Nvidia, ATI and other
| players for the most part were seeded by ex-SGI crew
| however. SGI had an instrumental role in those companies
| that ate it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same applies to Khronos APIs, they behave just like that,
| throwing the APIs out there and hoping for the best.
|
| No wonder they are always a shadow of what proprietary ones
| bring in the box.
| Melatonic wrote:
| The guy really is a visionary - although I gotta say he
| really needs to diversify his wardrobe. How long are we
| gonna see him in the same exact look with the black leather
| jacket?
| rchiang wrote:
| To be fair, Nvidia hired a lot of people who at some point
| worked at SGI and 3dfx, so there was already a lot of
| HPC/server/supercomputing talent working there. There are
| articles (e.g.
| https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/239078-ten-years-ago-
| toda...) showing the transition from having fixed
| vertex/pixel shaders in the GeForce 7000 GTX series to the
| generalized stream processors starting with the GeForce
| 8000 GTX series going forward.
|
| And it's easy to see that Huang and Nvidia put their money
| where their mouth was. The first GTC was 2009. That's 3
| years before the famous AlexNet paper that's often credited
| with kicking off the current AI on GPUs trend.
| [deleted]
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| You're in luck in that the development of Quake is pretty well
| documented. Both through a book and Carmack's plan files
|
| https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom
| zeagle wrote:
| This makes me really nostalgic for being introduced to SGI
| dogfight multiplayer on the local LAN I had occasional access
| to visiting a family member's employer. It really felt
| revolutionary for the day compared to the Pentium 1 whatever I
| had access to at home!
| xedarius wrote:
| I remember being on a stand next to SGI at E3 in 1997. They had a
| giant black truck in the arena like the one that Knight Rider
| drove into. They were selling these machines that looked way more
| powerful and expensive than anything the games industry could
| afford. People at the show were mainly debating when and if Intel
| could release a 1ghz processor. Stange what you remember.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| It was a common practice in the 90s for creative engineers to use
| extremely expensive "supercomputer" workstations to pay for
| productivity gains & live on the bleeding edge (e.g. Silicon
| Graphics workstations, NeXT workstations, and so forth).
| Question: What is the equivalent way to do this today? That is,
| is there a way to pay a lot of money to use a computer which is
| 5-10 years ahead of its time?
|
| Ok so I'm pretty biased here, but I think the answer lies in VR
| computing. There's no doubt VR computers are more expensive than
| their PC/laptop counterparts, but they allow you to adopt a
| bleeding edge technology which is essentially 5+ years ahead of
| its time in terms of where it is on the "commodity computing"
| frontier.
|
| A good quote from Alan Kay I find pretty inspirational on this
| front: https://youtu.be/id1WShzzMCQ?t=3345 Here he basically
| advocates for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a
| computing machine, in order to compute on what will be a
| commodity product 10-15 years into the future. VR computers
| aren't this extreme on the cost curve, but I think there is
| something to this point of view which I find really
| inspirational.[1]
|
| [1] Caveat: I'm one of the founders of SimulaVR
| (https://simulavr.com), so admittedly am very biased here. But I
| do think VR provides a way to convert money into "better compute"
| in a way that hasn't been available since the 70s-90s super
| workstation era.
| Keyframe wrote:
| You could shell out for Nvidia's DGX A100. Not the same level
| of futureness compared to current off the shelf stuff as this
| was back then.
| arapacana wrote:
| I respect the smoothness and honesty of your plug.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I think todays equivalent is more running a desktop with a 64
| core CPU and 128 GB RAM (or more), with as many screens as you
| want (I don't find more than two useful, but preferences vary).
|
| I could see VR computing as the mobile version of that. Laptops
| can be pretty powerful, but their screens are limiting. VR
| gives you the screen real estate without requiring you to set
| up monitors where you are.
| smm11 wrote:
| Commodity hardware and good video cards crushed everything.
| atum47 wrote:
| I was strolling in the mall when I noticed a really cool movie on
| a TV inside a random store; it was ffvii. Damn, I was like, this
| is the best 3d I have ever seen. By the way, I had never played
| the game by that point, none of the franchise. I kinda got
| familiar with the Loren just so I could watch the movie.
| Excellent job
| [deleted]
| trollski wrote:
| mikehotel wrote:
| In case this article piques your interest to try out a modern
| version of IRIX: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
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