Hello there, I agree, but here,(check what I said! I said 'for the middle to low end') we were talking about something that you and I can do on the home PC, and you might know that SGI specifically tied up with Nvidia to integrate with their range. As far as Pixar is concerned, they have a schedule and near free hand to do the work and how they do it is not with the PC (which is zilch for real time rendering)! the way they do it is through render farms (like one of our friends above pointed out). SCSI cannot be beaten as far as raw speed is concerned, but then, it is not always that necessary when you have loads of RAM!! that's what 3D needs for sure! For example, on the movie I'm working on right now, I have a scene which contains over 3,00,000 polygons, now, having 256 MB of RAM is so insignificant, because the virtual memory usage in my machine comes to around 800MB for a single frame of rendering!! and we all know that nothing is slower than the hard disk swapping.......so in such cases as mine, SCSI would be great! while, if I had a GB of RAM, the scene would work pretty good for me (not in real time though!)

(and Rob, I don't frequent the forum a lot, since I don't have the necessary time, but do take a look in from time to time, hopefully I will be able to rectify it )

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-- Aamir --
3D Artist