See http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2002-06-30/povcard.jpg   first...

To make this card is not technically challenging. I've been discussing
this with some fellow engineers for 4 years now. The only issue is cost,
which is related to quantity.

How many people do you think would want this and how much would they be
willing to pay?

Mike

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Ear gass. A card like that would cost a fortune, and never deliver the speed
you claim, and won't help making hollywoods FX look boring .... 96 gigabytes
... no, you got to be kidding.

IF a card is ever made, it would be a pure FPU accelerator, useful for other
than POV too.. But to be successful, the price range shouldn't exceed todays
game cards, and they are cheap because they're so popular.

I'm rather pessimistic with all this.. If you weren't kidding, I hope
someone here will agree with you, but I'm not the one.


Hugo

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I'll take 3, is my soul adequate payment?

--
Kevin
http://www.geocities.com/qsquared_1999/
#macro _(r)#if(r<12)#local
i=asc(substr("oqshilacefg",r,1))-97;disc{<mod(i,7)-3,div(i,7)-1,6>,z,.4pigme
nt{rgb 10}}_(r+1)#end#end _(0)//KL

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Are you joking? I don't know much about hardware engineering, so I 
really can't tell...

Mike Blakely wrote:

> See http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2002-06-30/povcard.jpg   first...
> 
> To make this card is not technically challenging. I've been discussing
> this with some fellow engineers for 4 years now. The only issue is cost,
> which is related to quantity.
> 
> How many people do you think would want this and how much would they be
> willing to pay?
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Samuel Benge

sbe### [at] caltelcom

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Considering how long Pixar's movies take to render, and that they're done
with *scanline* rendering, I doubt the speed that this claims it could have.

 - Slime
[ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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Mike Blakely <mbl### [at] ctscom> wrote in news:3D405CAE.BF7D063F@cts.com

> See http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2002-06-30/povcard.jpg   first...

if this would be true (real-time radiosity,photons,media,arealight etc in 
1280x1024) then this card would be probably bought by authors of 3d films 
(Shreak,TOyStroy,Ant-Z etc) and it would be worth IMHO 1e+x$ where x is 
4..6 :> because this kind of money cand be safe when using this ard istead 
off hundrets big PC's

-- 
#macro g(U,V)(.4*abs(sin(9*sqrt(pow(x-U,2)+pow(y-V,2))))*pow(1-min(1,(sqrt(
pow(x-U,2)+pow(y-V,2))*.3)),2)+.9)#end#macro p(c)#if(c>1)#local l=mod(c,100
);g(2*div(l,10)-8,2*mod(l,10)-8)*p(div(c,100))#else 1#end#end light_source{
y 2}sphere{z*20 9pigment{function{p(26252423)*p(36455644)*p(66656463)}}}//M

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"Samuel Benge" <sbe### [at] caltelcom> wrote:
> Are you joking? I don't know much about hardware engineering, so I
> really can't tell...
>
> Mike Blakely wrote:
>
> > See http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2002-06-30/povcard.jpg   first...
> >
> > To make this card is not technically challenging. I've been discussing
> > this with some fellow engineers for 4 years now. The only issue is cost,
> > which is related to quantity.
> >
> > How many people do you think would want this and how much would they be
> > willing to pay?

Of course he is joking, 96GB is already hard to have on hard disk, so think
of this in Ram...

Plus at 800 million pixels/s *and* 90 frames/s, you got roughly 9 million
pixels per image, ie. for example a 3442x2582 image, far from the
65536x65536 promised resolution. Unless they deliver either the resolution
*or* the speed...
At this speed, you no longer need meager OpenGL or DirectX accelerators...

As some others mentioned, if it was technically possible, ILM, Pixar and
others would had put a lot of money on the project...

A Windows 3.11 support (not to mention Dos) is... funny. I see no support
for AmigaOS not Tos (Atari)...

Is DKBTrace still alive? I used it on my Atari ST 520, and even recompiled
it on a Sun workstation.

-- #=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=# --
Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/

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Mike Blakely wrote:
> 
> To make this card is not technically challenging.

Well, getting 96Gigs of RAM onto a PCI card will be technically
challenging for several years.

> I've been discussing this with some fellow engineers for 4 years now.
> The only issue is cost, which is related to quantity.

Have you identified the most common calculations that are done by
POV-Ray in the course of a render?

> How many people do you think would want this and how much would they
> be willing to pay?

On a budget of $10000 I can buy an Athlon XP render farm that will
enable me to render a feature-length Rusty animation in about six
months (and that includes making frames that would take 7.5 hours to
render on my current machine).

Regards,
John

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Philippe Lhoste wrote:
> 
> "Samuel Benge" <sbe### [at] caltelcom> wrote:
> > Are you joking? I don't know much about hardware engineering, so I
> > really can't tell...
> >
> > Mike Blakely wrote:
> >
> > > See http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2002-06-30/povcard.jpg   first...
> > >
> > > To make this card is not technically challenging. I've been discussing
> > > this with some fellow engineers for 4 years now. The only issue is cost,
> > > which is related to quantity.
> > >
> > > How many people do you think would want this and how much would they be
> > > willing to pay?
> 
> Of course he is joking, 96GB is already hard to have on hard disk, so think
> of this in Ram...
> 

No joking, just dreaming!
Remember, 64K is enough for data page,
640K is enough for computer's memory,
512M is enough for a hard disk,
2 G is enough for a partition and a video file,
4 G is enough for file,
49 days and a few more is enough for a system clock to roll up...

> Plus at 800 million pixels/s *and* 90 frames/s, you got roughly 9 million
> pixels per image, ie. for example a 3442x2582 image, far from the
> 65536x65536 promised resolution. Unless they deliver either the resolution
> *or* the speed...

Well, you have the problem of the available bandwith anyway at the interface ;->
That's probably the biggest bottleneck.


> 
> A Windows 3.11 support (not to mention Dos) is... funny. I see no support
> for AmigaOS not Tos (Atari)...
> 
There was some in the early version (including also some older computer,
including a ZX80 (ancestor of ZX81 !), but it goes out to reduce the list :-)
May be I should have kept it in ?

> Is DKBTrace still alive? I used it on my Atari ST 520, and even recompiled
> it on a Sun workstation.

Latest version is now called Povray 3.5, I believe...

-- 
Non Sine Numine
http://grimbert.cjb.net/
Etiquette is for those with no breeding;
fashion for those with no taste.

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A serious effort to make a POV-card would have to resort to many parallel
CPUs with their own cache of RAM, and a small segment of the visual scene
dedicated to it.  Imagine splitting the image field into tiles, then having a
pre-processor that would divide the task into just what each tile would contain.
    Now, each tile gets its own 2+ GHz CPU, ends up only having about 64 pixels,
and blazes through a special RISC high speed processor.  The microcode would be
dedicated to image processing, the textures and pigments would be flashed into
memory and could be updated, and then the output would be written into a video
frame buffer.
    Now you have a chance to actually make this thing.  This could be the
rebirth of the transputer, only with new technology.

Cheers!

Chip Shults
My robotics, space and CGI web page - http://home.cfl.rr.com/aichip

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