I completely agree Marshall. There are some very specific architectural issues in the Talisman specification which are dubious at best, like how they parcel up graphics operations. I just thought that it was entertaining that in the same quote where they talk about misinformation, they are guilty of it themselves. Also, rendering for something like Toy Story has very little to do with real-time 3D rendering. They are very different problems when you can take minutes per frame as opposed to milliseconds. If you are trying to render realistic images in real-time, hardware support for pixel based shading and lighting are critical, as well as hardware texture support. For movie making where you can run a farm of workstations, those issues don't have nearly the same impact, and, actually rigidity of a specification is a drawback since the hardware graphics support will always lag behind the current rendering technology (and methods). This is likely the reason that Pixar went with Sun. The Gouroud (sp?) shading offered by SGI's hardware acceleration (polygon based shading) is inferior to Phong shading (pixel based), so there is no advantage to paying the extra cost for the exotic graphics hardware when it won't do what you need anyway for nonreal-time rendering. For real-time rendering however, getting the most out of hardware acceleration is critical. And that, I believe, is where the PC graphics market is. And that is why there will always be a place for companies like S3. Reference Andy Grove's "War for Eyeballs" speech at Comdex.
Obviously long,
-klaus |
