New IBM Graphics Workstations

[David Hinds]

In article <9007261139.AA05802 at aero4.larc.nasa.gov> blbates at AERO4.LARC.NASA.GOV ("Brent L. Bates AAD/TAB MS361 x42854") writes:
>
>    The last I heard was that the IBM's were comparable to the bottom
>of the SGI line, 4D/20 with minimal graphics.
>--
    The IBM RS6000's have several levels of graphics support.  The 8-bit
color 3D graphics level is quoted as doing 90K 3D vectors/sec, and 10K 3D
polygons/sec.  The 24-bit color 3D graphics system is quoted as doing
990K 3D vectors/sec and 120K 3D polygons/sec.
    For comparison, SGI says a base IRIS 4D/50 with 8 bit planes does
140K vectors/sec and 5.5K polygons/sec.  An IRIS with GTX graphics is
supposed to do 475K vectors/sec and 100K polygons/sec.
    It is not obvious how to compare the figures, however.  The IBM
report quotes the lengths of vectors and sizes of polygons used.  I looked
through all our SGI stuff and couldn't find the corresponding information.
These were the same SGI tables that quote 100 MIPS and 50 MFLOPS for a
4D/240, which are the theoretical limits, rather than performance on any
standard benchmark.

 -David Hinds
  dhinds at popserver.stanford.edu