SLCentral Forum - View Single Post - Final Fantasy Type Animation Techniques

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Originally posted by Aamir
Hardware for top notch productions is SGI based, mostly on the Mips range of processors with SGI graphics. On the middle level to low level platform, you have Dual and single processor Xeons or (now) Athlons and loads of RAM and very fast graphics cards like the 3D labs range, or the FireGl range or now, the Nvidia Quadro range of cards (GeForces are not much slower though )

Not likely. Quoth Pixar, upon the release of the GeForce 3...If you think that this little toy can handle Pixar-level rendering in real time, you're sadly mistaken.

Seriously, the O2 systems and most other SGI hardware has a lot of very highly-optimized pipelined graphics hardware that just throws down the AGP bus.

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The hard disks are mostly SCSI, but with ATA100 now, I think one can make do with goodly speed.

Probably not. SCSI has faster response speed and much higher throughput. ATA100 can hit about 20MBps at best. 320 SCSI LVD has a tendency of breaking 100MBps. ATA-RAID can handle some video editing, but if you're serious, you don't use IDE.

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Frame rendering depends on the equipment and/or the scene complexity as well as the type of rendering being used (i.e if you use raytracing or radiosity based rendering, it increases rendering time significantly)

Number of systems can depend on the complexity of the project and the manpower involved. For EPISODE1, over 200 SGI workstations were used full time (50 TB of data passed in a single day between the network!!!)

The technology we're referring to is already here, but it is on a much lower scale.....for example, you can't expect a card that gives great frame rates in Q3 (about 10000 poly's per frame max, to handle 5,00,000 poly's in real time.....I think it is going to take a long time to accomplish)

Indeed. Plus, when you factor in other rendering formats and techniques like NURBS...A GeForce3 doesn't accelerate NURBS. The high-end hardware can, and does. Diamond's FireGL cards were designed to handle OpenGL, HEIDI, and a small handful of other rendering specifications. DirectX was an afterthough. And Microsoft is foolish if they think that DirectX can EVER be a serious platform for anything but games and low-end multimedia.