(12-28-2024, 03:16 AM)mc68k Wrote: This is the theory of operation. But WHY Octane works perfectly with the SAME OS, same software version, while Indigo 2 Max Impact, O2 etc. are almost unusable due to incorrect color palette in Maya? I can't believe how people were satisfied with a 50k+ USD machine which cannot run the same programs as well as a cheap Windows NT?!
Well I'm not an expert in this area I think you might be not taking you to account the vintage of those machines. A lot was happening between 1993 and 1996. Remember Windows NT 3.1 = 1993 while NT 4.0 = 1996!
I know it seems like three years in your mind isn't anything, when you think of today you're wondering why the heck it couldn't do it. But you have to remember that these were almost generational jumps. The Indigo2 is matched with the Indy in terms of generation of PRO and ECONO class stations. The O2 was leap for the Indy-class of station, the Octane was a leap for the indigo2 station.
I know their clock speeds don't seem much different in terms of what an Indigo2 to an Octane might be. But you're not taking into account that there was in fact a CPU improvement and a family architecture improvement and that there was a substantial graphics improvement every year back then. A three-year gap would be something akin to a seven year gap nowadays maybe closer to 10 years if you really think about it.
And I do have trouble believing that NT 3.1 could do what you're asking, If you're remember NT 4.0 doing it...you're in OCTANE timeline! So that would make perfect sense.
Please understand that starting at about 1986 all the way up to about 2007-ish, we started with machines being obsolete after three months, then after six months, then every year, then every two years, and so on. Computers today have a much longer lifespan than they had before because the technology isn't moving at that rapid pace anymore that doesn't allow the average person to do what they need on a system that's even 10 years, old by today's standards.
You're impressing the expectations of today on something from when the technology was still struggling out out of adolescence and into adulthood. It wasn't exactly in it's infancy but it wasn't far out of it, in it's "tweens" so to speak.
The Indy was always underpowered so I wouldn't put that anywhere much of anything, unless you really maxed it out and even then I'm not really sure. Administrators from back in that time can chime in and tell us how effective an Indy workstation was maxed out versus average economy config.
So while I wasn't there, I think you're skewing the interpretation by a few years in the timeline. SGI was king of the hill for about a almost 10 year period from what I understand. Because each year or two it was literally a generational leap that did twice as fast or something like that.
In the early 80s, it was the CPU and ram that was doubling every few months. Once we got into the 90s the doubling may not have been as prevalent as the multimedia features were then starting to catch up now that the base systems could actually process at those rates. Then CPU enhancement started to come out that allowed for multimedia and certain math operations to have special instruction sets and such that really made multimedia start to stand out in the late 90s (98-ish?). By the time something like Windows XP was common place by 2003 or so everything had been pretty much standardized in terms of basic resolutions and bit-depths.
In the mid 90s all of that was still in flux, and being pushed aggressively with each new product release.
I mean Indigo2 & Indy use SIMM (like from a 386/486 PC) memory, compared to Octanes & O2 uses SDRAM! That's just an example but that's generational. You need to keep the base technology aligned when SGI was pushing the envelope versus what IBM personal PC clones were doing back then.
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