From: Blair MacIntyre Subject: Re: PROD: Question about VR hardware and authoring kits Date: 19 May 1997 21:54:10 -0400 Message-ID: Organization: Columbia University "Marcia J.Talkmitt" writes: > 3. I have a machine that has all of the basic 3D modeling > packages including the capabilities of stereoscopic imaging with the monitor, ^^^^^^^^^^^^ > Sound Editors, Media Editors, Teleconferencing Tools, HTML Editors, and > more....These packages are already built into the WebForce deal. Stereo, you want stereo? Sheesh. No wonder you weren't happy with the PC. > >Another nice thing about the PC architecture vs SGI is that is a lot > >easier to add weird hardware. How much does a multi-channel > >digital+d/a-a/d board run for an SGI box? How well does an O2 handle > >sound generation inside while running graphics? Can you add a $200 sound > >board and get decent 3d sound? I have PCs, SGIs, Suns, HPs, and Macs. I program on SGIs, Suns and NT for the most part. I have a Mac on my desk for doing non-programming work (only two machines in our lab have the Win95 virus -- one is turned off in the corner right now, since I put the newest Ultra140E/Creator 3D on that desk, and one acts as an OpenGL/X display beside my office desk, thanks to eXceed3D). I have never experienced serious hardware incompatibilties with Suns or SGIs (well, we did get the wrong texture memory from SGI once, but they sent us the new stuff right away), but I have spent countless hours tracking down hardware and software problems and incompatibilites on PCs. I wouldn't say that the tons of 3rd party stuff is all good. I'd rather have one or two good options than one or two good ones plus 20 bad ones and no way to tell them apart aside from trial and error. So, yes, I have to agree, the nice thing about the PC is that you can get lots of different devices, plug them all in, spend many hours trying to get them working, find out that cool-device-X only has DOS drivers, cool-device-Y doesn't work if you have cool-device-Z in the system, find out the device driver for wizbang-3D-card-L decides to render you checkerboard polygon mesh as a sequence of colored horizontal lines, be told that perhaps we can debug why cool-device-P doesn't work, but you need to reinstall the OS and take out all the other cards, decide you wanted to install software-package-R but you don't have enough space on drive D:, on which 100M of unknown components _must_ be installed, install cool-3d-thingy-F and discover that neato-program-J no longer works because some incompatible version of a dll got installed by the F-installer, etc etc Or, you could plug in the O2, go through the setup (which is about as painfull/painless as NT or Win95 setup) and discover that it has tons of software on it already, has most of the cool-neato-hardware you would now have to install, so you get some work done. Oh ya, did I mention the stereo? Yes, I did, that's right. Let's not forget that to get decent 3D stereo on a PC you must spend thousands of dollars. None of your cheap 3D cards (and 99% of your expensive 3D cards) support stereo. But, you don't need stereo for VR, do you? It's more important to have that multi-channel digital+d/a-a/d board. -- Blair MacIntyre (bm@cs.columbia.edu), Gradual Student, CUCS smail: Dept. of Computer Science, 1214 Amsterdam Ave, Mail Code 0401 Columbia University, New York, NY 10027-7003