Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!mcnc!decvax!savax!thompson
From: thompson@savax.UUCP (thompson mark)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: COMDEX Announcements [TMS340 GSP]
Keywords: TI, 34010, 34020, FAST, fast, Fast, Real-time.
Message-ID: <823@savax.UUCP>
Date: 6 Dec 88 16:24:15 GMT
References: <13541@oberon.USC.EDU> <7718@well.UUCP> <13603@oberon.USC.EDU> <28@sdcc10.ucsd.EDU>
Organization: Sanders Associates Inc., Nashua, NH
Lines: 49

In article <28@sdcc10.ucsd.EDU>, cs161agc@sdcc10.ucsd.EDU (John Schultz) writes:
> In article <819@savax.UUCP> thompson@savax.UUCP (thompson mark) writes:
> >The '20 is certainly a nice improvement over the '10 with some great new
> >features and some respectable performance. But if by Real Time you mean
> >30Hz update...dream on! A fully loaded top of the line Silicon Graphics
> >|      Mark Thompson                                                     |
> 
>   A 30Hz flight simulator, sure.  A 30Hz ray-traced animation, uh,
> maybe .030Hz.  I saw an AT&T board at NCGA crank out about 1 frame
> every 3 seconds.  They called it real-time. Of course, frame rate

I saw it at SIGGRAPH. Very nice! They use someting like 85 of their
DSP parts working in parallel.

>   We're getting 16-30 frames/sec with a standard Amiga in
> SpaceSpuds, just using the blitter efficiently and limiting the
> animation.  It runs at over 45 frames/sec on an 030/020 machine,
> never slower than 30 f/s (only 30 frames/sec are displayed).  All
> this in Stereo 3D.

Great job on SpaceSpuds, I love that game. When I said 30Hz was a pipe
dream, I should have clarified my criteria. I am referring to doing
double buffered animation from a display list by which the render buffer
is cleared every 33msec and the image generation is started from scratch.
A reasonable looking flight simulator would require about 2000 polygons
per/frame (flat shaded). This would seem doable on 100k/s polygon machines
but other overhead operations keep you from maintaining 30 Hz. SGI's
simulator currently runs around 20Hz.

>   Look at all the tricks used in Starglider II.  Runs very fast,
                    ^^^^^^
Ahhh.. thats what I'm getting at, no tricks allowed.
Seems I remember a quote about a '...suitabley rigged demo...' :-)

>  Maybe not Evans and Sutherland quality...
>  Yet.      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Hope you saw the real time texture mapped automobile simulator they did.
Hot stuff.
> 
>   John Schultz
>   Dreaming on...

Glad to hear it because dreamers make miracles possible.
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|      Mark Thompson                                                     |
|      decvax!savax!thompson       Designing high performance graphics   |
|      (603)885-9229               silicon today for a better tomorrow.  |
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