Onyx RealityEngine2 demo

[CarlsTechShed]

Found one of these on eBay just now.... £5.50 with two bids (ebay item number 110799225284)

[Tha1DJPLex]

Reality Engine, now in Direct X

[AshleyMarkPomeroy]

Cor, I remember watching this when it was on telly - the spinning bust was very impressive, especially compared to the Amiga demos of the time (of course the hardware was a lot more expensive).

[Treisprazece]

I knew SGI are some of the best vfx workstations but realtime reflections, true 3D and all that distortion in realtime in the 90', omg at that time i was shocked by the wolfenstein 3D, what this workstation was doing then was not even imaginable for many of us. Kudos SGI !!!

[TheWaynelds]

@Treisprazece True. I would love to find a version of Alias/Wavefront Power Animator, just to play around with it and see what doing CGI was like back then, compared to now. Wolfenstien 3D is actually not 3D. They used 2D tricks, like in DooM, to fake the 3D stuff, or "Virtual Reality" . Like scaling textures, or for instance, you couldnt have a room on top of a room and the enemies were just 8 directional 2D sprites.

[MarsBorg]

The TV program was called Bad Influence

[JulianPersival]

How is called this tv program?



[lesleyhenriquez]

A few of the SGI machines use an architecture most machines today can be jealous of. Supercomputer like crossbar switch and such. Forgot which machines exactly, long time since I´ve used one.

[lukewind30]

Food for thought......an iPhone is more powerful then this computer.

[babyplaze]

lol looking back on technology like this makes me chuckle when i see games like Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield 2 because they look absolutely riduclous. Were no longer in the realm of using our imagination to make games look like real life, weve almost got to the point of photo realism :)

[killa123123]

yea but does it play crysis....wait what am i talkin about my computer doesnt play crysis now..

[UncleFeedle]

Good to see this again. I remember watching it on its initial broadcast and being in total awe at the real-time reflection mapping. Today I do 3D modelling using a fairly mid-range graphics card that, as well as reflections, also delivers real-time texturing, bump, specular, normal, displacement, antialiasing, HDR lighting and shadowing, on models infinitely more complex. Most of what Andy Crane is showing here can today be done on a cheap laptop. The pace of advancement has been unbelievable.

[carl0071]

lol £250,000... I bet you can get them off ebay now for a tenner :-D

[dvamateur]

Is it running Irix maybe? Anyway, these days these things can be done on a PC (running either Windows or Linux) or a Mac. Using a PC seems kind of cheesy compared to using a Siligon Graphics machine. Similarly like using an Emulator II sampler was much more cooler than using a cheep looking PC to do the same thing. Anyway, good old days in that only fully qualified people had access to powerful computers. Others would say these were bad days for the very same reason.

[wrestler50000]

I was well into SGI once I looked into the technology behind Terminator 2. I was 9 years old. lol.

Learining about SGI, in some cases, was the starting point learning computers in general. If I had the money at that time, I would have purchased one of those expensive systems.

Once I heard the N64 (Ultra 64) was using SGI technology (so to speak), I knew we were not far away from have high quality graphics in most homes. Around when N64 came out in UK, I had a Voodoo2, and Unreal rocked! :-)

[Diamonddavej]

I wrote a final year project on 3D visualisation in 1996. I predicted that people would soon stop buying SGI, they would instead buy cheaper PCs with 3D graphics cards. Cheap 3D graphics cards killed SGI.

[EdinburghGuy]

SGI's engineers wanted to make PC level boards. It was SGI's executive who had the attitude that Hollywood would always buy SGI regardless of the cost. When, 3Dlabs and 3Dfx brought out the first 3D graphics chips, SGI's engineering group left to form Nvidia.

I did my Honours years project in 1991 using a 24-bit programmable graphics card (Hercules Graphics Station Card). With a bit of assembly it could Gouraud shade triangles.

[turbografx]

I remember in 1996 when the SGI InfiniteReality was first demo'ed. Ten times the performance of RealityEngine2, and over 10 million texture-mapped polys a sec. On TV they showed a sweeping view of a mountain, it was jaw dropping. Years later, I read that Nvidia NV10 (GeForce 256) which was released in 1999, was designed by SGI's InfiniteReality team. They had joined Nvidia. Another group from SGI broke away to form ArtX. They designed GameCube's graphics then got bought by ATI.

[Trilinear]

turbografx - very interesting. It's always great to hear that the teams responsible for these incredible legacy systems are still playing a big part in the development of today's technology.

[rofthorax]

It is certainly much easier than the SGI's were.

[rofthorax]

Well I don't use Windows anymore.. I do use Wine, but the great thing about Wine is it standardizes the API's that Microsoft has left behind permitting the technologies to thrive on the linux platform long after they've become obsolete. Or you can get a nice natively written program on linux. Without paying Microsoft a dime for it's sugar coated releases.

BTW, I can upgrade Ubuntu without losing my user accounts nor my wine (windows) installs. Try that on Windows.. Thank god for open source.

[rofthorax]

There is something to be said about how much our culture respects people with the ideas. An inventor has to be really aware of patent law and tactics like patent flooding to permit one to stay in the game. Because there is a lot of predatory companies like Microsoft that just sit around and look for competition on the horizon, ready to obliterate it before it can grow to be too successful. And we all thank them richly for that.. What a dumb fuck society we live in.

[rofthorax]

Of course there is no telling how much I actually know and how much I think I remember, also no telling how much politics would have delayed the progression of technology. But I don't know about you, but I've wasted about10-20K on the progression of technology to get to this point already, but at least for the ones that only just discovered the technology, those will like revere and thank Bill Gates and Microsoft a lot more for this stuff than either really deserve.

[rofthorax]

Also note that John Carmack wrote Doom to run on the NeXT before porting it to the PC's. It was originally written in Objective C on a Unix platform which is what the NeXT was. The monsters in the game actually use message passing to reveal where the player is.. I really wonder how many games these days have as good an AI system.

Also I've heard the NVidia cards only render the polygons, the transforms are performed by the CPU. In the SGI's this was usually done apart from the CPU.

[rofthorax]

I think NVidia and Intel had more to do with the innovation of the machines we have now than Microsoft did.. Microsoft just profited from being the middleman.. But Intel owes much of their success to Intel by keeping them out of competition with DEC's Alpha processors, for example. If Microsoft had of adopted the DEC Alpha platform, Intel would have been history.. Microsoft only distributed NT on the DEC Alphas but dropped support for it in the early part of this decade. And DEC bit the dust.

[rofthorax]

I don't know if it would have been possible with or without Microsoft, just that Microsoft has no grace in doing it.. And Bill Gates cunning has inspired many young chinese business enthusiasts who will likely bring on a second industrialization without regard to personal and human rights. Note, Bill Gates once had stock in waste disposal companies.. I think these days he spends more time padding his ego to make up for those he stepped on along the way, and many people have been fooled.

[rofthorax]

Also if SGI hadn't of opened the GL technology platform, why we call it OpenGL and not the GL which is what the SGI Iris used.. John Carmack wouldn't have been able to take advantage of the OpenGL library to render the graphics for Quake. It is only fitting that Carmack (who really would rather the industry support OpenGL2 than DirectX) would have released Doom 3 utilizing the shader technology that NVidia developed. If you removed SGI from history, it might not have happened at all.

[rofthorax]

This is the "out of box experience" he is showing off, this came with every SGI in the 90s.. But the experience was dramatic especially after seeing dreamy realtime textured 3D in Cray demo reels in the 80s..

[rofthorax]

Also the SGI's had wider bussess, they could do video editing work on raw video streams, in realtime I'm sure,m and such.. Didn't the O2's have a 1024 bit crossbar?

[rofthorax]

Yeah and no pixel shaders.. Well they did have the ability to render nurbs in hardware, and the processors were about as slow as P-133's but still could juggle 100,000's of polygons.. Try that with a Pentium 133..

[caserock]

WHOA TEXTURE MAPPING

[Membrane556]

Not sure if we'll see as much advancement in the next ten years as we seen since the SGI Onyx because have things really have slowed a lot recently.

My latest PC is nowhere near the jump in technology from what I used in 1998 a powermac 9600 was from the very first computers I used a COCO3 and Amiga 500 even though both happened in the same amount of time.

I think Moore's law is running out of steam that or software is getting really crappy.

[sonicfeet]

The metal texture the host mapped on the Beethoven model is the same texture used for Metal Mario in Super Mario 64.

[mike4ty4]

It's amazing... now we can realtime-render graphics of much greater detail on much smaller computers with today's CPUs and graphics cards, that cost a tiny fraction of what this thing did.

[rofthorax]

Thank god Microsoft stole SGI's technology while SGI execs were gullible enough to do a deal with Microsoft.. Now we have the fast fantastic 3D graphics cards and SGI is a just a memory.. SGI's were way overpriced though, 19K they were asking artists for a copy of Alias Poweranimator and an O2, and to justify the expense they were telling the artists that in the first year the computer would pay for itself.. I was sick of it.. That's why I pushed the use of blender.

[mike4ty4]

"Thank god Microsoft stole SGI's technology while SGI execs were gullible enough to do a deal with Microsoft.."

Microsoft? I wasn't aware they were in the graphics hardware business.

[rofthorax]

They weren't, SGI was, and Microsoft wanted the GL technology for their operating system, I think part of the deal was to make a graphics card for the PC, and Microsoft sorta held back SGI in negotiations until they could slingshot DirectX far enough ahead that SGI had no opportunity to make a foothold in the PC market. I may be wrong, but a friend of mine told me at the time that SGI was prostituting themselves to Microsoft.

[mike4ty4]

So how does this have to do with the development of the graphics _hardware_ we have in today's PCs, which is what enables all that graphics power?

[rofthorax]

Well let me see.. SGI did it first.. Microsoft didn't have it.. Microsoft wanted it.. Microsoft took it.. SGI went away.. If Microsoft hadn't of stolen it.. We probably would have had to pay for it.. But then again, if Pixar hadn't of sued BMRT's designer for replicating renderman's language, NVidia wouldn't have hired him to make a shader language for the NVidia boards.. But games drove the whole market anyway.. Just we have DirectX vs. OpenGL2 . & Intel/Microsoft want to close the platform.

[mike4ty4]

"We probably would have had to pay for it.. "

As in "pay $40,000". That's crazy. It's great good graphics technology is available now at so more accessible prices. However, it's not so great that it's being closed down, and the PC being "dumbed down", so once again a true "general purpose" computer would cost sick amounts of cash.

[rofthorax]

I think SGI had no concept for reality, that was probably part of their undoing. It also seems that the hardware they were making was hand manufactured than mass produced. They were trying to do what Apple was doing with the macintosh's, control the platform, put into it quality design, but in the end it just resulted in a lot of throwaway technology. That's why and open platform is good, less waste. Yes, I think Microsoft would really rather everyone leave the programming to them.

[mike4ty4]

"Yes, I think Microsoft would really rather everyone leave the programming to them. "

However I'm not so much talking about _soft_ware as I am about _hard_ware. As whatever has happened we have gotten good computing _hard_ware at much better prices.

[rofthorax]

Video games have pushed the computing more than anything.. I think SGI underestimated the potential of their hardware and probably not prepared to do with it what NVidia did.. SGI came as a result of the failure of Tron and the intense cost of cooling crays, but with the failure of SGI came NVidia.. I'd say they have more to do with this than Microsoft, but Microsoft tends hide technology behind API's that they subsequently change each couple of years to stimulate a repurchase and retraining.

[rofthorax]

There is no telling how many millions of dollars people have wasted to get us here, people are only aware of the present not what lives and dreams were destroyed in the process. And certainly not how much time was wasted in having products come to market. Recall that Steve Jobs said in X Cringley's "Triumph of the Nerds" that he saw the Smalltalk system Xerox had, but he didn't see the Object oriented language or the ethernet network, he saw the GUI.. He later made up for it by making the NeXT.

[rofthorax]

Also Windows was developed from MSDOS, so for the first decade of Windows, it was running with a cooperative multi-tasking system which meant an application could bring the computer to its knees if needed. While the Amiga computers had true pre-emptive multitasking. It wasn't until Windows XP that windows had both pre-emptive multi-tasking and symmetric processing.. However that was years after such technology existed on many unix machines.

[rofthorax]

I think Bill Gates motto would be, it doesn't matter who did it first, it only matters if it is ours. OF course, that doesn't respect the intent of the product designer who would best know how to evolve the technology as he'd know more about it. But life ain't fair, I guess..

And thus we all must wait for innovation given the release cycles so that the manufacturers than make money on the incremental release of technology that was developed years ago.

[mike4ty4]

"Video games have pushed the computing more than anything.. I think SGI underestimated the potential of their hardware and probably not prepared to do with it what NVidia did.. SGI came as a result of the failure of Tron and the intense cost of cooling crays, but with the failure of SGI came NVidia.."

Do you think it would have been possible to have gotten their hardware down to the cheap cost of today's, if NVIDIA and Microsoft weren't here, and SGI didn't make the mistakes it did?

[rofthorax]

I don't know, but Microsoft reinvented a lot of what was already invented in the 80s on the Amigas and macs. The Amigas already had object oriented design on a assembly language level. Microsoft makes money by keeping API's inconsistent, that means that technology is made obsolete by design. That's to keep working technologies from competing with future ones. It's also the reason for license servers and DRM/EULA. It looks good on the surface but there is not telling how much was lost.

[rofthorax]

It's history, it's what happens when people are greedy, and where that ultimately leads.. It good we get cheap 3D games and such, but now Intel and Microsoft and the PC industry, in the interest of protecting media creators, are effectively trying to close the PC platform so it can't be used for any other operating system but vista.. Inspired, probably by the cellphone companies and Apple ipod.

"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher, from the movie The Matrix.

[rofthorax]

The result PC's are becoming gradually becoming game consoles.. No longer will you be able to use a computer for what you want, you will be offered only game systems, media centers, computer appliances.. But you won't be able to use the raw parts to do anything else. Like make a game system a computer, a computer into a media center, and so on.. You will only be able to do with computers what the idiots dominating the 90% are only capable of comprehending.

Welcome to America, land of the dumb.

[mike4ty4]

"Like make a game system a computer, a computer into a media center, and so on.. You will only be able to do with computers what the idiots dominating the 90% are only capable of comprehending."

And so what if you want a real _general purpose_ computer at that point? Go out of America? Because you said: "Welcome to America, land of the dumb. "

[rofthorax]

Pick up a book on OpenGL.. Read about the SGI's transformation pipeline. How objects are rotated, and such.. How objects are textured, colored and rendered.. The SGI's were the first to put this into hardware, and make this work in realtime. Before the SGI workstations, there were no boards for the PC's that would do this.. In fact, it took a while before there were graphics boards capable of doing 3D graphics rendering.. But you could do software rendering on the Windows 95 with OpenGL.

[rofthorax]

If SGI hadn't of done this, we probably wouldn't have had fancy 3D video game cards.. Maybe we would have? But in the 80s 3D programs draw objects back to front (called "painter's method"). It wasn't instantly obvious to some how to make this work in hardware. Not that there wasn't computers fast enough to do it, just that SGI took the right approach to making it work.

Before SGI people raytraced for 3D. Note, TRON was raytraced at 8000x8000 on crays a decade before SGI did similar in realtime.

[rofthorax]

Read up on the history of the movie Tron, it's where SGI got it's start, it was the fallout of the work on Tron. Tron would have benefitted from anti-aliasing technology in particular. Instead of drawing to a film recorder, if instead the images were rendered to 1600x1200 like they were for Pixar's "a bugs life", you'd seen more complex graphics that what was used in the film, just it wasn't obvious to the makers of Tron because nothing like that had ever been done. Phong shading was even new.

[rofthorax]

The concept of a shader, and of the shader languages, like renderman shading language that Pixar devised in the 80s, and the realtime rendering of 3D graphics like the SGI's.. We wouldn't have all the fantastic pixel shader effects in our games.. Certainly if the maker of BMRT hadn't been sued by Pixar for stealing from Renderman (which was false), NVidia wouldn't stepped in to hire him, and NVidia probably wouldn't have developed the realtime shader technology.

[mrjustin5]

For such a super expensive computer is only 200x faster than an average computer? Price/performance cost is pretty low... but then again, there wasn't much else that would do these types of effects and rendering in 1995. I was in 10th grade when this video was made.

[qgyu]

I had one of those by my desk. Each RE2 board had 16 (IIRC) i960s, and you can have 4 boards inside an Onyx. That's on top of the 4 MIPS CPUs. 7200rpm SCSI Barracudas had just come out, and tops out at about 4GB while the 9GB Seagate was a 5400rpm 5 1/4" full height drive. How time flies.

[sybrfreq]

I think that each geometry board had 12 i860s per board, but I may be thinking of the original reality engine. the rack onyx can hold 24 cpus, as opposed to the desksides, which held 4, and probably more graphics too.

[cybercow222]

rocks

[guitarguru2006]

true 64 bit technology in the mid 90's that no one could afford now available on ebay for dirt cheap.

[SiliconGraphicsInc]

@guitarguru2006 Dirt cheap, except the shipping costs :(

[NuGanjaTron]

@guitarguru2006 Um, when was the last time I saw an Onyx(1) on eBay? 3 or 4 years ago?

[toresbe]

I absolutely love the fascination with which he describes this.

[sinHHHans]

that's what cryEngine 2 and Unreal Engine 3 will look to us in a about 10 years ^^

[babyplaze]

@sinHHHans shit man this is so true, we will look back on games like Modern Warfare 2 and Crysis in 5 to 10 years time and think they look horrific compared to what will be out in the future.

[Mekose]

@sinHHHans Holy shit, that idea blows my mind.

[TopCub1]

Oh my god ... I remember those days ... In comparison with today's technology, this is just plain ANCIENT!

[cybercow222]

nice