[bjames]

After searching some websites about Indy video, they say you can add Indy video to an Indy that has the 2 board zx gfx, but looking inside my machine, it doesn’t look like there’s room to stack another card on top of the 2 gfx cards.

I have an Indy video card coming in anytime, but I was wondering “if” the indyvideo card will in fact work with a zx configuration or if I have to downgrade to a 24bit Xl.  Perhaps my eyes are deceiving me.

[jan-jaap]

You are right, the XZ takes up all the space.

FWIW, I think Ian Mapleson once benchmarked the various Indy configurations and the R5000 CPU can do geometry faster than the XZ graphics board, so XL24 might actually be an upgrade Might also depend on what other things you do, I don't think XL24 has a hardware Z buffer for example.

To be honest, if you've got an Octane MXE already I'd just keep that for geometry intensive things and let the little Indy do video.

[bjames]

It was Ian Mapleson web site "Indy Buying advise" page that spec'd an Indy Dream system as an ZX with Indy Video. Another site (Obsolete SGI IIRC) mentioned the Indy video will work will all GFX options, I just dont see that happening.

Looks like I have to find an XL 24 board as it appears downgrading to a 24 is not as simple as removing the ZX daughter baord. I do have an 8 bit board in a spare machine, but that would not be ideal.

[dexter1]

Even if the XZ board has two layers, there is space on the top side closest to the PSU which can hold one 'upside-down' GIO32-bis card. One such card is the Presenter-XZ card, but i haven't seen any other card fitted in that slot.

[radiance]

The R5000 + XL24 option is not a good solution imo, it depends on what you're doing.
The R5000 will be able to transform more geometry, so for complex models and multiple light sources it's faster.

The problem is that the software zbuffer/raster is very slow, and for anything larger than a 320x240 sized window, the bottleneck is here.
If you want to run some larger windows, like a 3d modelling app like blender or something, the XZ option is faster due to the HW raster/zbuffer.

I upgraded from R5K 180MHz with XL24 to XZ and had MUCH better performance because of the above, Ian Mapleson also mentions this in his Indy Buyer's guide:


" Worse, however, is that my tests finally showed SGI's 'XGE' concept to be flawed. I regard the spacestation as a pretty typical model in terms of acceptable complexity level for a platform like Indy, yet R5000SC/180 24bit XL only gets 2.14 fps for the max-window test. Clearly, the more important Z buffering effects have already taken over, limiting how fast an R5000 XL configuration can perform. Similar behaviour can be seen with the stars4 model, stars3, the smaller landscape models, angus, etc. Things only seem to change when the Z buffering is made less important, ie. a small window size, or when the main CPU calculations become intense (very large landscape model). Examine the small-window (SW) results for the angus model: this time R5000SC/180 XL beats R5000SC/180 XZ (and R4600PC/133 XZ). But this situation is unusual since most users would wish for large window sizes when doing 3D modeling.

With hindsight, Indy's graphics options should have been more like Indigo's, ie. more modular and easier to change without having to replace the base board set. With Indigo, one can add a Z buffer daughtercard to an XS24 configuration, or add video memory modules to go from XS8 to XS24. This isn't possible with Indy. "


You can't connect the Indy Video board to the XZ as there is no connector/space for it. I think Ian simply made an error when he spoke about "XZ + Video"...
The only connector ontop of the XZ set is for the Presenter board as mentioned above by dexter1

Cheers,
Terrence

[bjames]

Thanks Terrence, that is exactly what I was thinking. The zx board beets xl24 when using full screen or larger windows, and as I expected, you can’t have the best of both worlds i.e. either zx gfx or Indy video, but not both.

I have 2 Indy’s one with r5000 and one with r4400. I may dedicate one for video and one for 3d. I just have to find space on where to set these up without my wife complaining.

I’m thankful she allowed me to setup the octane in the living room. lol