SGI Octane Upgrade and Test Driving a 1997 Graphics Powerhouse
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- Опубликовано: 30 сен 2024
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Today we get to try out the Octane from Silicon Graphics Interactive, and we don't just test it, we also beef it up with some huge upgrades from SGI Depot. Maya, OpenGL, Lightwave and Blender are just a few of the technologies and applications which benefited from the SGI series of machines and we try out as many as possible today.
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Part one of this series: • Meet the SGI Octane - ...
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Hello and thank you for watching today. Thank you to Ian at sgidepot and to Kai for hanging out and helping to make this. Also be sure to check out NordVPN at nordvpn.org/RMC and get yourself a bargain while you still can. Neil - RMC
RetroManCave nordvpn link doesn’t work for me
@@musicianie Must be nice to live in an area where you *can* change ISP's. Some of us don't have that luxury - some of us live in areas where there's only one viable broad band option.
Most welcome! :) I'll post a couple of extra notes shortly about the system...
Interesting. I have an old Sun Ultra 30 with 300Mhz. But it only has 128MB ECC EDO DIMM. I found 8x 256 EDO DIMMs that fit, but are probably not ECC. Do they still work? I don't wanna throw them in and the thing breaks. :D
Nope, I already pay for openvpn ;P
Useless information: The architect behind IrisGL and OpenGL, Dr. Wei Yen, was also the Nintendo64 lead architect and created the GX graphics library, a proprietary Nintendo dialect of GL optimized for games. After the N64, he and a few of his colleagues left SGI to form ArtX, the company responsible for Flipper, the Gamecube GPU. ArtX was then purchased by ATI, with Wei Yen then serving as member of the board at ATI, and was a big contributor to ATIs legendery 9800 GPU. Wei Yen was also a member of the board at Monolithic Systems, the company responsible for the 1T-SRAM memory used in Gamecube and Wii, founded AI Live, the company that did the middleware for the Wii Remote, and he also led Acer's cloud division, which handled Nintendo's online platform in the Wii days. He was also president and CEO of iQUE, Nintendo's distribution company in China at the time. I think he completely left the field roughly ten years ago, and hardly anybody ever heard of him, but he was incredibly influential back then.
I used to work for an SGI dealer. I was their "IRIX" person, as I did Unix. I loved playing around with the workstations when I had the chance...One of my favourite demos was the tumbling asteroid with the particle spew...it was later used in the opening credits for Star Trek: Deep Space 9. You can see both the demo reel segment and the opening credits in the links below...
SGI Demo Reel:
ruclips.net/video/p2qivAkzKZY/видео.html
Star Trek DS9 Opening:
ruclips.net/video/2TsMyLt2BTM/видео.html
That sort of animation took soo much power to do!
I used Octanes in our animation lab and had no idea about their prices, but I discovered that Maya and Softimage 3D were freaky expensive. I then tried to do some of the stuff I did on those on a slightly newer computer and it just died.
I developed software on SGIs in the mid 90s. Absolutely loved working with IRIX, wonderful machines in their day.
Blender is born on Amiga as TRACES, then evolved as Blender on the SGI Indy. The first version was 54k of C header files and source code.
Anyway, SGI is maybe the most badass company that ever existed
A4000+Video Toaster, i remember those days :)
@@oddballhippie7363 The Video Toaster has Lightwave 3D, not Blender... ;)
@@Vlamat67 i know. I used one at my work back in the day. The company went out of business 1995. We used to do ads.
@@Vlamat67 he never said it had Blender ;)
@@litjellyfish Det stämmer ;)
Fun fact: XFS is still in use today in the Linux Space and is the Default for RedHat Enterprise Linux.
Yes and Oracle Linux too. Very quick (especially with handling very large files, as you'd expect with something originally optimised for video).
SGI had a hardware accelerator for XFS functions, it was even more faster back in the days.
Ron Laws can confirm...our SAP S4/HANA cluster at work runs on XFS filesystems!
It's the default and very useful it is too on all unRAID installations. Happily running a 3+1 drive software RAID on my home server.
I know this.... This is a standard UNIX system
I got that reference :^)
Yep, that 3D file manager was really crazy for it's day. Crazy enough to be even included in a movie.
I noticed the rendering of the 3D file explorer was slow in the movie.
I used to see it in my teenage dude! Its cool!
@@retropaganda8442 And now we know it probably was missing texture memory lol
Considering when all of this was made, this hardware is just insane. The software was light years ahead of it's time as well.
"As with everything SGI did, it's all turned up to 11" - Best quote of the day. Thanks for a wonderful video.
including the price!!🤣
3Dfx was founded by ex-SGI employees and 3Dfx GLide (i believe GLide was the official 3Dfx way of writing it in the early days, but that could just be me remembering it incorrectly) was 3Dfx's own API based on OpenGL. 3Dfx later became 3dfx and GLide pretty quickly became Glide IIRC. Oh the nostalgia of my original and early Orchid Righteous 3D, the early version making an actual audible click when going into 3d mode... That click was pretty loud as well and it was just such a very satisfying sound.The click was probably from some sort of relay on the board, but that click combined with the animated 3Dfx logo just plays on my nostalgia guitar strings!
The Orchid Righteous 3D was, i think, the first 3Dfx Voodoo graphics board. It was glorious!
Couple of points about the IRIX and Octane...
If anything I would say IRIX is very plug & play, in that just about everything the OS was ever intended to support is already known to it, so most of the time one can install a hw option and there's no need to do anything, just reconfigure the kernel and reboot, in most cases just reboot (the GigE card needs a reconfig, but the QLA12160 and dual-serial card I put in the PCI Cage don't). Some options do require separate drivers, including most of the video I/O boards, but certainly not a clean reinstall.
As for changing a gfx option from one to another, again one doesn't need to do anything as long as one is using the same generation of gfx, eg. SI, SSI, MXE, etc. are all MGRAS, while V6, V8, V10 and V12 are all VPro. Thus, in this instance, upgrading to MXE required no changes, just power up and it's ready to go. If one changed from MGRAS to VPro though (eg. upgrading from MXE to V12), or vice versa, then indeed one must reinstall some key libs in miniroot inst, but only bits of the IRIX eoe, X libs and gfx demos, no need for a full reinstall (this has no effect on installed apps or user data). One just reads in the original relevant CDs (or from disk as I do), enters a couple of commands that mark for reinstallation any item that needs to be changed, let it run and that's it, reboot and it's done. Complete reinstalls on SGIs are rarely ever necessary. Mind you, if one was running Flame on such an upgraded system then of course one would have to replace the Flame config file with the relevant alternate version, and likewise if then installing video options such as the DM2/DM5/VBOB, etc. then those do need drivers. That btw is why I erred towards MXE and DIGVID, as setting up an Octane2 with VPro and video options is a lot more involved (the VBOB alone is enormous and it needs quite a few cables, plus a DCD card and V12; alas I have no V12s atm).
Re the PCI options, as is so often the case with such tech, there's sometimes a relevant caveat or gotcha. In this instance it's the bridge chip that converts between XIO and PCI. Although the PCI bus is 64bit @ 33MHz (the usual max theoretical 267MB/sec), the interface ASIC doesn't work that well and thus over a single PCI link can't do more than about 187MB/sec. However, it does scale well across channels, I've managed almost 600MB/sec with an Octane using four different XIO ports and a bunch of QLA12160 HBAs, and 700MB/sec should be possible if I didn't use any gfx at all. For its time these rates are enormous. SGI btw fixed the ASIC design for the Fuel/Tezro systems and XIO2, they work better and support much faster PCIX at up to 133MHz aswell.
Re the dual-port FC card, that model is a copper card with 100MB/sec per port. I cannot offhand remember though whether the connection through to the host is direct XIO or if it goes through the same XIO/PCI conversion ASIC mentioned above, though with a max 200MB/sec it wouldn't matter that much anyway. Neat part about FC is very high scalability; an original Flame/Smoke setup I obtained from one TV studio in Leeds had two 15-bay FC units, each filled with 73GB 10K FC drives, for 2TB total. That was a heck of a lot back then. A Smoke Octane I bought from BBC Belfast had a similar FC array filled with 36GB drives. In Flame/Smoke of course one would define at least one disk in each Stone array to be a parity drive for data protection. Atm I have six original Discreet systems (three Octanes with Flame/Smoke, a Tezro with Smoke, an R4K/250 MaxIMPACT Indigo2 with Flint, and an Effect O2).
Hey Neil, pity you didn't show the Huge Engine Model, with transparency - one of the more impressive textured demos. :) Did you try out DI_Guy, F18, Matterhorn, Macau and the others?
Ian.
----
General ref: www.sgidepot.co.uk/octane2/sgi_octane2_datasheet.pdf
www.sgidepot.co.uk/octane/
Very interesting, knowledgeable comments. Thank you!
@@rsmith02 Most welcome! :)
Back in the 90's I read a lot about these machines and how they were used to create movies and 3D videogames. It was a dream that someday everybody could have a computer with this level of creative power. Now we are in the future, and seemingly limitless computer power is available to everyone for very little money, but the dreams of a future world also seem to have disappeared because there is no contemporary equivalent of SGI to show what a good future would be like and to inspire people.
To get close to the experience of buying an SGI. order yourself a new (2019) Mac Pro. Select maximum for all the options e.g RAM and SSD size. Then add in two or three Pro XDR Monitors, and don't forget the monitor stands :-). Of course the majority of SGI workstations were bought for professional use. I have never used one but used Sun workstations a lot and am hoping Neil will review one in the future.
If you are talking about working for SGI then I would imagine a job at Oak ridge Laboratory or similar might be equivalent. Their systems make the new Mac Pro look like a toy.
If your ISP is throttling your traffic, you don't need a VPN, you need a new ISP...
Not necessarily.
Yes. And why shall we trust a third-party VPN? Instead of the ISP, the VPN provider can see all your traffic.
There are parts of the world, where you simply have no choice in ISPs.
NordVPN doesn't monitor traffic or keep logs. This is the whole point. They are also based in Panama, outside of British and Western jurisdiction.
Nexusband Like the USA, you mean?
Yep i worked on SGI in late 90's to 2001. it was a big deal. Was for engineering stuff, fluid mechanics and differental equations. One was the slab and the other was a honking night stand on wheels. thanks for the tour.
About fluid mechanics i can confirm, since i heard (and partially confirmed) that the University of Cagliari had Silicon Graphics workstation (i know for sure they had an Indigo R4000), and the CRS4 (Scientific Research Center in Pula, Sardinia) had many Silicon Graphics workstations and rack mount supercomputers (from the IRIS 4D to the Onyx²) for scientific research (and there are still videos of them working with IRIX)
Lol, I have an SGI Crimson that doubles as a desk and internal storage. The slab is my Indy. I have been working with SGI computers since 1998. Was a interesting ride for sure.
XFS is still rocking today! Very fast under Linux.
My Octane is the last of all the obsolete UNIX workstations I’ve collected over the years, that is still setup in my office and gets powered on at least once every month. I have mine connected to an SGI Presenter flat panel display. I also still use two SGI 1600 SW displays which are hooked up to my MacPro 1.1 running FreeBSD. SGIs stuff was built to last! And IRIX was an amazing OS...any OS which comes preloaded we the shareware version of Doom is more than alright, in my book 😁 Also, it’s still pretty easy to get open source software installed on IRIX, thanks to a project called nekoware.
EDIT: Almost forgot to thank you for shining a light on the awesomeness that was SGI. They seem to be quite underrepresented on RUclips when it comes to retro tech, unfortunately!
I remember seeing the Silicon Graphics demo on Bad Influence and being in awe. My mind is blown that a few years later, I’m watching this on essentially a super computer multiple times more powerful and that fits in my pocket. Thanks for documenting so beautifully these machines which were built by pioneers and which ultimately paved the way to what we are blessed with now. Magic! 💫
Studying digital 3D in the late 1990's, I remember Lightwave, Maya and SGI pretty well. SGI machines were the best you could get, but they were ludicrously expensive, well out the reach of a student budget. The software applications weren't cheap either, and us students had to resort to piracy to get the applications. Other 3D software used at the time were 3D Studio Max (PC only), Infini-D, Alias Sketch!, Extreme 3D and Cinema 4D. The hardware I used at the time was Apple Macs, running on a 603e or 604e CPU and render times (in ray trace quality) were long... very long. Things got better when the PowerPC G3 CPU was released, but by then, I had moved on to other things.
Fond memories studying 3D, creating worlds, creating textures. You had to double check everything before you did that final render, because if there was a mistake, you would have to wait another several hours for a rerender.
ARM is great, but MIPS will always be my favourite RISC arch.
My favorite will always be the Alpha.
MIPS was taught in the CPU design classes at my school because it was so simple and regular.
The SGI was also an IO MONSTER! we used as enterprise Backup Servers.
The amount of high speed tape drives and networks on could attach to the SGI was great. The XFS file system was fast and incredibly reliable . XFS had cluster aware, had it own volume manage and you could do snapshots with it. Features that are now coming to others,
They open sourced it so you can still use XFS today.
Part 1 was awesome, part 2 is even more more awesome-er :) what would be truly epic, and i think would go down really well is if you could shoot an episode complete with 90's style 3D effects/rendering and compositing all done on the octane, man i'd love to see that! probably be a labour of love though, but your the kinda guy that could pull it off i'm sure ;)
"but first...are you watching this securely?" Well, I'm wearing a five-point safety harness, flamesuit, welding gloves, a crash helmet and three condoms. That's pretty secure.
Absolutely cackling that Maya won't run (for licensing reasons or otherwise, it's a very classic Maya moment)
You need a license to run software. Not sure what's so strange about that ?
You need to fire license server, flexlm server, so maybe it's actually possible to run it on that machine...
Just getting to see machines like this running is a dream come true. SGI is the stuff of legends.
You deserve much more subscribers and views.
Your relaxed and friendly style is absorbing and welcoming.
Thank you I appreciate the kind words
Don't know about the machine... But I know the nerd level of the comments section is all the way up to 11... 😂
Loved every second. That can still compete with the machines I use for 3d modelling and video editing. I use SBC's tho(I review them on RUclips). Too bad many are still missing opengl drivers.
I can't wait to see part 3 with it in the hands of a graphics artist. Let them make an awesone Intro of your RetroManCave. Just love it. Thank you. Greetings, NicoD
I started to watch this video with my BT headset on which somehow decided to switch to a GSM codec from the 90's....I thought it was part of the video... :')
FYI: 1920*1035 is equivalent to a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, used in movies where having a wide angle is not important. It's 1920*1080 counterpart has a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, used in RUclips videos, modern video games, and cheaper smartphones.
Interesting that it has odd number of pixels, though. That doesn't get along well with digital displays these days (trying to help someone render a video with an odd # of pixels and the common formats didn't support it)
Folks, THAT is how you professionally produce video content. As always, Neil, great work. I'm still floored how modular and thought through SGI's hardware is. Those poor in-house engineers but then again at the time i'd imagine they all were over-the-moon creating never before scene technology to really drive performance, stability, and modularity. What exciting times it must have been not unlike the first railroad tracks being laid down across unknown lands and the thoughts of its future potential! Neil, keep doing more SGI content.
Very kind thank you
An SGI engineer told me in the late-90s that their ethos was, "What can we build you guys for $50K?". And it was top-down design with high-end tech flowing into low-end, eg. Octane is basically just a single-node Origin2000 with a gfx pipe shoved into one of the XIO ports (the 8th port unused; in Origin it connects to other crossbar ASICs). Alas this approach faded in later years, it all become bottom dollar, etc.
This though is partly why IRIX is so stable, it was designed to cope with mega high-end systems like Origin/Onyx2 (try writing kernel code to cope with 32 CPUs all hammering one GigE port at the same time - SGI tech told me the initial drivers they received from Intel fell flat on its face, while their own early mod made the Intel chipset melt because the card was never expected to hit 980MBit/sec), so running on a mere Octane or other IRIX desktop is like a yawn fest for the OS. :D
Note that all I/O tasks and numerous OS functions automatically exploit both CPUs aswell, so a dual CPU system is snappier too. The CAD Duo option was particularly interesting; two users, two kybds/mice, two monitors, dual-CPU Octane with dual-SI or whatever, both users can work flat out and never notice they're sharing one machine.
Loved this video.
It would be *REALLY* interesting to hear more from Anthony about Inferno. Given its unobtainium status, I think many of us graphics nerds from the 90’s still lust over Inferno illogically to this day. I for one would love to get a sense of just how close does a modern AE/Premiere rig get to an Inferno rig.
I have an Onyx3K multirack which I think used to be an Inferno rig, but I can't be certain as the original owner kept the CX-Brick (and hence the original system disk). See:
archive.irix.cc/apocrypha/nekonomicon/forum/3/16720350/1.html
Inferno for IRIX is not unobtanium, but probably not worth bothering with these days unless one has an IR4 and can still make use of it for compositing. Discreet lmited the host processing side to only 8 CPUs in order to push Burn lics, ironic when 8 CPUs in an Onyx is virtually an insult. Some day I keep meaning to benchmark a max-spec Inferno rig (8x1GHz IR4), but it's a tad hard to retain any quad-1GHz node boards I obtain as they keep being sold on. :D Not selling my IR4 though, that's for keeps. I have one quad-1GHz board atm but it's acting weird. Ah well, maybe next year.
SGI had quite a few ex-Commodore people there when OpenGL was made, though I'm not sure if they had a hand in it. The Hombre chipset and new AmigaOS that never made it out was going to work with it, as retargetable graphics was planned for it.
OpenGL was just the open sourced development of IrisGL. The earliest SGI machines were called IRIS, and the name stuck around for a while (Professional IRIS/Personal IRIS/IRIS Indigo). So the graphics library was called IrisGL from the beginning. So IrisGL goes back to around 1981 when the company was formed. The Geometry Engine ASIC which SGI invented (we’d call it a GPU today but that’s not quite right) implemented the IrisGL in hardware. So they’re tightly related. SGI decided to open source their graphics library/api in 1992 and make it an industry standard.
So if there were some Commodore folks around in 1992 I don’t doubt they worked on OpenGL, but it’s not like they brought the tech from outside as it has already been part of SGIs dna for ten years at that point.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIS_GL
Did you say the foot is on the other hand LOL, what does that mean.
Heheh yes, this is a quote from the film Airplane!
Adobe made Photoshop and the like for Irix, but won't make products for Linux? Flippin' 'eck. Don't they realise how prevalent Linux is in the production world?
The only Linux systems I've seen in the production world are turnkey systems specifically built to do one thing, like Baselight. Adobe's current lineup of programs are designed to run on off-the-shelf systems and simply don't _need_ a Linux version. Credit where credit's due, Adobe have gotten the whole system stability thing on consumer systems pretty much nailed, which is rare. Also Adobe's spike in home use over the past 10 years has shifted their focus from developing software on specialist OS'... Instead they're too busy developing (IMO totally unusable) editing apps for mobile devices.
@@LiamS94 You've never seen Linux animation systems? It's huge in the 3D world and in industrial settings.
[edit: here's a few examples]
Titanic was made on Linux. Pixar use Linux. And a quote from Ars Technica:
"Most of the major studios use Linux -- such as DreamWorks with more than 1,500 Linux desktops and 3,500 Linux servers. The MovieEditor Conference is an all-day event on computer-based filmmaking in downtown Los Angeles on August 3rd. Studio technology chiefs and other experts discuss ongoing work using Linux in feature animation and visual effects. Presented in collaboration with LinuxMovies.org."
The company I worked for at the time tested Photoshop 2.5 for Solaris on Sun SPARCstation 10. The hardware specs knocked our standard Mac II machines into a cocked hat and in the round the Adobe/Sun combo was so much better it should have been a no-brainer Buy! Buy! Buy!
What killed it was the position of the Ctrl key on the extreme edges of the Sun keyboard - it made many 1-handed key commands into 2-handed operations. It's absurd but something so daft actually made our skilled production oppos _slower._
So, entirely by accident, we made the correct decision not to invest. Correct because Photoshop for Solaris didn't survive into version 4.0 (neither did the Irix version).
I've always wondered if that was due to poor uptake and if so how much of that poor uptake might have been the result of experiences like ours.
Just as a reference for people, while 8GB in a system like this might not seem like much, Windows 98 supported a maximum of 1GB of RAM. I have a Celeron socket 478 based system running Windows 98 'cause I can't for the life of me find any older functional hardware locally. It was a pain, disabling ACPI, amongst other things. I went for a 3GHz Celeron (massive overkill) because I dual boot the machine for early XP games too, and some classics released on GoG's website. Also, the 3GHz celeron is better for this era than a Pentium 4 because most games (And windows 98) do not support Hyperthreading what so ever, so the best bet is really fast single threaded performance.
SO with that said, these machines could've been running 4, 6, or 8GB of RAM when most people had 64-384MB of RAM
More SGI Videos.. perfect!!! So glad you put another video out!! Really wanna connect one of my SGI´s again!
0:32 did you mean Anonymity? ;)
That's absolutely a deliberate mistake to check you were paying attention. Honest..... oh ok haha yes more coffee needed well spotted
I didn't even notice that, probably cos I'm stoned
I'm glad that one of my kin could support you
May-a? You mean Mai-a? As somebody who uses Maya and Nuke everyday, it's neat to see where they started.
A machine build for a purpose when no other was up to the task yet, deluxe content creation.
Sure, you could create and render some FLIckerfiles on your 486, it would take you a day to render that 10 seconds in 320*200 and it would look like made 3D Construction Kit.
Does anyone actually believe when a youtuber says they personally use NordVPN anymore?
Currently connected to NordVPN UK node #1448! I wouldn't endorse it if I didn't use it.
SGI release the source for the 4dwm. Man does it look lovely. CDE is already free'd so... high hopes.
So. Iris GL is Vulkan's Grandfather?
I happy to see instead of being catfished this time you caught the rare White Elephant instead. It's best sticking with land animals it seems.
Holy shit, Lightwave 3D, I remember using a pirated copy on my home computer running Windows NT in the early 2000’s, and having to run a render overnight for a five second clip. Those were the days.
I know Lightwave needed an hardware key. How did you cracked it?
Keys called a .dll, just like any other dll it gets cracked.
I love Maya. Been using it since 2002 and still prefer it to anything else... though I liked it better before Autodesk bought it and made it more clunky.
Have you ever used the earlier Power Animator? Specifically version 9.0? Users of Maya on SGI from the early days who came from PA told me that although Maya was a lot more potent for obvious reasons, they still preferred to use PA sometimes for certain things. I heard similar comments about Alias Studio, ok up to V11 but V13 receives much scorn.
Btw, my C-Ray/Blender/Maya/Alias render benchmark pages are here:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER1_blender.html
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER2_c-ray.html
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER4_maya1.html
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER3_alias1.html
@@mapesdhs597 Alias Power Animator was a great modeler, great NURBS modeler. Most of the stuff was transferred to Maya, but probably not everything...
I think you meant to say "Anonymity" instead of "Animosity" in your paid promotion.
Indeed. I think he should re-record that bit before using it again
Yeah, that tickled me when I heard it.
Thanks for the awesome trip down the SGI memory lane. Back in the day I would have killed for that kind of power.
Oh, and any application that ends up in Autodesk's hands in guaranteed to just live on in a zombie like state. It's the Autodesk kiss of death. Take it from a 23+ year former "customer" that has seen many applications that I owned just walk off into the sunset with that company.
They were and are the Borg of pro apps. :}
Obligatory "Can it run Crysis?"
Just kidding, what an impressive beast for it's day, but also accompanied by a beast price tag!
Perifractic has just done a series of videos with the original Worms cut scenes in Lightwave - It would be interesting to see how quick this bit of kit renders them in full HD :)
Very happy to see it running. Such a lovely machine, I'm really jealous. :)
All the tech porn aside, I think what SGI really championed was stylish cases. Those things are works of art. Especially if you consider how computers typically looked in the 90s...
SGI were so far ahead of everybody back then, it's mind-boggling. It's a massive shame they never managed to transition into more of a serious workstation-type company, they might've survived then. You literally can play the what-if game with SGI stuff for hours.. What if they picked up free Linux or BSD early on, and focused more on regular workstations and consumer hardware with the crazy hardware skills they clearly had? Would Windows NT even have had a chance had they done so? Would ATI and Nvidia even exist? PC history might have turned out very differently, for sure.
The trouble is the crazy hardware skills cost money. All the workstation companies like Apollo, Sun and SGI went out of business. Not that surprising as all the CAD software I use at work now runs quite happily on a standard desktop PC.
SGI was killed on purpose by Trojan horse CEO, who after ruining went running from SGI to MS.
IRIX was variety of UNIX System V with BSD extensions, so all it would need is better desktop environment. You could run GNOME on it...
If you type more /etc/fstab, and more /etc/mtab you will see... It does the same thing it did on Irix machine... Joking aside, a core functionality is there.
MS was the end of SGI in more ways then one...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API)
512 meg memory was crazy considered most 486 pcs maxed out at 64 megs or ram I think
I remember the Octane's predecessor, the Indigo² could be outfitted with 512 MB RAM... _theoretically_ . In practice, it would overheat with that much of the type of memory made back in the day.
X 86 arcatexure actually came out in 1981 to compete with the 6502 and 6800
The first time I heard to 1gps network was in highschool computer lab when I good to look at they're Brady new Windows XP computers in 2006 I believe it was then it was right before Vista
@@FindecanorNotGmail First I've heard of an Indigo2 overheating from RAM, and I've dealt with hundreds of them (I currently own about 50). Note the original Indigo2 R4K could only support up to 384MB, while the R8K supports up to 640MB and the R10K model supports 1GB, though SGI never officially mentioned the latter since by that time they wanted customers to move on to Octane anyway (which in some regards was a sensible policy as Octane's I/O and mem bw is much higher, all the better to cope with big data). 1GB in R10K Indigo2 runs just fine, my system has that (fitted with HIghIMPACT, IMPACT Compression, Colorspace daughtercard and EISA 10/100) and I know someone who uses a max spec Indigo2 with it aswell doing a hefty Blender prject. 1GB using 2x 256MB and a 512MB kit doesn't really create that much more heat than three 128MB kits, and later denser kits work fine. But there was no config that had a max of 512MB.
Thermals in Indigo2 were far more an issue for IMPACT graphics with texture boards. Customers with MaxIMPACT who didn't clear out the dust regularly were asking for trouble. Speaking of which, dual-MXE (or MXI) is not supported in Octane for the same reason, just too hot. Mechanically it'll work and the OS won't mind, but the heat is too much for the cooling in use. However, MXE + SE was supported, possibly MXE + SE/Tex aswell (along with the somewhat slower I-series equivalents).
The later VPro gfx uses less power and generates less heat though, so dual-V12 works ok, but the custom XIO carrier needed is very rare.
@@FindecanorNotGmail I've got an Indigo2 with 1GB working at home, it's the system I borrowed to LGR reviewed here: ruclips.net/video/ZDxLa6P6exc/видео.html
And all my mini fridge can do is hold a couple bottles of beer! 😏🍺
Love the trip back in time. I had friends who worked at SGI and took a Irix Sys Admin course on the SGI campus in the late 90s. I am not a graphics professional but do appreciate how you presented the Octane. We ended up using a Sun SPARC at that time and I hope you can find a similar age Sun SPARC system to show off. Keep the videos coming!
I love industrial/utilitarian stuff. When I make my own cases, it is the vibe I’m
after. China does it quite well,
unfortunately the internals tend not to be so impressive. I keep an eye out for ‘metal boxes’ that can
be repurposed, I don’t want my PC looking like a PC (well accept my Surface
Go).
Looking at the technology, even today it seems impressive,
there’s plenty (the majority) of hardware that can’t do this today to a certain
extent. Such as the seeming millions of
Cherry Trail CPUs that continue to leak out of China in those industrial
cases. At the same time £500 gets you
just enough technology to join this party.
My son (10) has just got into stop motion with LEGO and we are managing
fine on an old smartphone, with the all-important software, and a £500 PC I
built using an AMD APU (16GB of DDR and plenty of NVMe and SATA SSD). I’ve also started using a few Raspberry Pi to
add to his roster of cameras.
And that touches on your last point, how things have become
easier and more accessible to the ‘everyman’.
I can remember my main PC (yes, I did actually have more than one) in ’98,
a Pentium 2, 200Mhz with 192MB of memory- it impressed geeks back then- for
about 6 months. I didn’t do graphics,
but I did do audio and that seemed to take a relative age. And you had to ‘know stuff’ back then. These days I know very little, the technology
has moved on, I haven’t but I have the internet and ‘apps’.
"Inferno" is such a cool name for a compositing system.
But yeah, most of the time people only have some graphics demos that come with irix, and re-creating how these systems were actually used in their day is next to impossible... most of the stuff is proprietary and with dedicated support staff. For example someone purchasing "Discreet Inferno" would be purchasing the SGI hardware as part of a dedicated turnkey system with a support contract and if you were large enough - dedicated administration staff. I'd say most of this is completely lost to time.
These aren't 80's microcomputers where you can look at the preserved software library and peripherals and say "Yeah, I know how day-to-day use of these would be like"
Just notes:
It'd be interesting to go into how Irix is different from Linux is different from Solaris.
Also SGI's contributions to open source, like OpenGL, the C++ Standard Template Library, XFS file system, Open Inventor also fall into the 'today owes a debt of gratitude to SGI' category.
Thing is, you start walking in any direction and you're wandering down any number of rabbit holes. :)
Fun fact: XFS(the filesystem you mentioned) lives on in the Linux kernel and continues to have a rather large userbase of weird people.
Default filesystem on RHEL7 too
@@TheErador as I said, weird people
@@Megatog615 hahaha well played
If Sun had licenced zfs under GPL etc, it would probably be the default today due to the advanced features it has over a number of other filesystems, but the licencing means it won't be included by default in the Linux kernel.
It's not about what VPN you use, but I have experienced connectivity issues when not using a VPN... My ISP pretended not to be able to explain why I'd suddenly lose connection to different places. I gave up the fight and started using a VPN service... Now I hardly ever have issues.
But, as an IT professional I also know that they may not be doing this intentionally, there are TCP/IP configurations that are just not very stable, especially for long-time streaming... However the VPN crowd seems to know their protocols better than the ISP crowd.
Cheers.
Try Zen for ISP. They don't throttle at all.
Where's electropaint!!? Its absolutely mesmerizing. I kept an O2 just to have it run that screen saver.
It’s been ported to macOS. It’s the only screensaver I use.
Back in the day, Alec Baldwin could have said in Glengarry Glen Ross.
" This computer costs more than your House ". That's who I am!
Why would be a third-party VPN be secure? This party can see all your traffic. Using VPN is just moving a point of where all data can be seen.
Not all can! Some offer no log abilities allowing your data to be secure!
Absolutely fantastic machine and piece of history, but to be honest I was quite a surprised how quite badly GL Quake & Quake 2 was running on that almost 30k US$ graphical card, probably not best port, but I remember that we ask kids had almost supernatural expectations from these machines, something like realtime full scene phong type rendering preview in Softimage 3D or Maya 3D.
Anyway big thanks for these SGI videos, I was always interested about these machines, and wanted to own one of them :-D
I remember watching a live demonstration of the SGI Octane in 1997 and they showed the production of commercials and movies such as the Fifth Element. It was cool tech at the time and many components in PCs we use today has roots going back to SGI hardware
Node locked software... love it
Spent 60k on that shiny new sgi... what can it do out of the box? Hinv
It wasn't made to be used out of the box. It was build to be used with high end graphics and video software, for 2D/3D graphics animatio, CAD/CAM simulation and design, and real time online video editing.
thanks for the brilliant followup, amazing kit!
wait what? the file manager has a zoom scrollwheel?
Yep - the icons are all vector-based so can scale with zero quality loss, no pixelation!
"it's all turned up to 11" - including the fans. :)
I miss my Octane, but I don't miss the noise.
That's the machine I wanted back in the day!
As with all your videos, awesome stuff!!
Thank you!
There is another 3D beast software you are missing on this platform is "Softimage|3D" which I was begin with in this industry. A powerful competitor to maya.
Have fond memories of SGI (and Silicon Graphics) hardware in the 90's. The pre-press and print bureau where I worked had Barco Creator, an image manipulation application, running on Iris Indigo and raster image processing (RIP) software serving film recorders on SGI Indy.
That's ironic, one of my Octanes has an original Barco Creator setup on it (dual-R12K/300 MXE with DIGVID); seems to run fine though I know nothing about it. I didn't know it dated back to IRIS Indigo though, very cool.
@@mapesdhs597 I started in that job in 1992 and it was there before me. I was just the junior so I didn't get to go to Belgium for a week to train on it like some of my colleagues! It was way more powerful for compositing than Photoshop at that time. The Silicon Graphics hardware could handle files that you'd never dream of trying to manipulate on Macintosh hardware. It had what must have been a very early Wacom tablet and a Barco branded monitor.
I did learn how to FTP files back and forth to it at the command line to and from a DEC Alpha which served output to a Kodak LVT film recorder, input from a Mac with a drum scanner and backup to open reel tape.
The Indys came later, replacing what were probably 386 DOS PCs, bringing the RIP times down to a fraction of what they were before. I can't remember the name of the software they were running. What I do remember is the vivid blue of the cases and I'm pretty sure the monitors were grey with a lighter grey fleck? Like no computer I'd ever seen before, or since for that matter.
@@totallypixelated Yes that does sound like they were Indys, and indeed Octane was a powerhouse for big data related to visualisation. I talked to a guy at Chevron who said they used basic SI+Texure systems for GIS, but the machines could blast through 750MB volumetric datasets in less than three seconds, something utterly impossible on PCs of that era. They had a 12-CPU POWER Onyx for larger datasets.
Interesting factoid: MXI and MXE gfx options use SLI to double performance. An SGI tech once told me this wasn't the case, but the technical report shows it is indeed the case:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/octane/octane-technical-report.pdf
Great stuff. It is hard to see it in context, but I got into 3d animation in the late 90s with 3d studio Max, and back then, this kind of real time performance was beyond most budgets. We were just taking standard desktops and throwing ram and gpus at them but while that was great for games, oddly, 3d editing software didn't really work well with that budget approach.
Nice informative video. Now i'm looking forward to you doing a review of the Transputer, ideally the Atari Transputer Workstation, which for 1989 / 90, was the fastest renderer bar non.
The closest thing you'll find to IRIX today is iOS/macOS. I'm not kidding.
UNIX: check.
Fast, reliable filesystem: check
Everything HW accelerated: check.
Semi-proprietary 3D API: Check.
Expensive but serious hardware: check.
What???? You re not feeling right.
Irix was being used on highend enviroments running seismic and bio datasets for months something you ll never do on mac. Mac os is an irix cheap copy.
You say you re not kidding because you re aware that people will laugh about what you wrote.
Expensive but profitable not a pretty box for instagrammers. You couldnt find a raptor scsi in that era but apple charge you a lot for the brand not for increased performance.
Irix was known as one of the more unstable, insecure unices. You want stable, you go with Sun, DEC, or IBM.
Blender 2.44 running on this thing? Crikey. In very early 2000s, I tried out Blender 1.x (yep, the original closed source version) on an SGI O2 at the university lab, and I suppose it was snappier to edit 3D scenes on it than at home because, uh, I don't think I had good 3D acceleration on my Linux PC at the time. (Mesa OpenGL was a thing, but not speedy.) 2.44 is downright *modern* in comparison.
Edit: oh yeah, the actual render speed on my home machine was slower, but not unbearably slower. Blender Internal was purely a CPU renderer.
Urpo Lankinen especially the Blender renderer wasn’t raytracing, which adds lots of computational complexity. Hence the relative quickness.
Note I put on 2.44 because it's quite a lot faster than the 2.45 build for IRIX. The last version released was 2.49a IIRC, but it has the same slower speed as 2.45. My benchmark page is here:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER1_blender.html
For broader comparisons, I also admin the main C-ray page:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER2_c-ray.html
and there's also the Maya/Alias pages:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER3_alias1.html
www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp_RENDER4_maya1.html
Amazing tech for the era. 😄👍🏻
I just looked up the flame product page. AUD$5645. ...Per year.
20 years ago it was a lot more than that. In the early 90s I remember seeing pro lic costs that were 50K/pa.
That is why companies didn't mind spending a few tens of thousands of $ for some high end hardware to run it on.
I remember seeing the chrome teapot running on an Indigo 2 machine, completely blew me away as I was still on an Amiga 1200!!
MY-A NOT Maya as in Mayonaise or do you guys on the other side of the pond call it My-a_naise?
Funnily enough, the English pronunciation of Mayonnaise seems to be wrong too, as French pronounce the "May" in Mayonnaise like in Maya.
I find it fascinating that the new Mac Pro have a similar internal layout/design philosophy as this old SGI workstation. It's refreshing to see properitary solutions as they are often different from the ATX standard.
The external access of AIB have finally become commonplace through the Open Compute standard in servers, which is mainly used for network cards.
In a different thread I was just comparing the price of the new Mac Pro to SGI equipment. However, even an SGI was cheap compared to bespoke equipment like the Quantel TV Graphics system Neil reviewed recently. As for ATX the original idea was to reduce costs by using the PSU fan to cool everything, not improve performance.
So much faster than mine :/
What a fantastic piece of retro tech!
Digging the funky beats at the start!
Wow so much effort was put into this! Amazing!
I vaguely remember seeing Neil in the cave with an SGI Indy. Wonder if that will become a video some day...
I donated that, too ;)
I have always wanted one of these vintage SGI machines. Amazing architecture they created for doing 3d, and 2d graphics.
re. all that scrap metal - brings new meaning to the phrase Big Iron :)
10:39
DOOM, of course. 😈👍🏻
I installed Doom, Doom II and Ultimate Doom on the machine, of course. :D
Can try the topaz 3d. I remember on a 486dx2 for one render you have to wait almost 24 hour.
Thanks for the video Neil. Very interesting to hear it's story and of the Open GL origin, I had not realised that, not being previously familiar with the Octane. This would very much of been beast mode on in it's day!
You have pleasant and well informed videos. Thanks for creating content for everyone, much appreciated!
You're welcome, thanks for taking the time to watch
RetroManCave thanks for the reply always nice to hear back especially from the content creator. Hope to see more great content in the future, thanks!
03:09 Good to see delrith from the angry joe show helping you with the system :-)
dang my boss just tossed an old SGI onyx
**sob!**
You should of gone dumpster diving!
He could've sell parts and earned quite a lot of money... ahhahahaha.... stupid...
Put up a bed in the cave and then lock Anthony in, make him make some sick animations on the Octane for us to enjoy. Errm I mean, invite him over.
SeltsamerAttraktor 😊
Still have one of those Bad Boys sitting under my Desk. Love to play with it from time to time
Wow cool! An SGI-episode!
It would be cool to see a modern 3D animator or artist try to use the old version of their tools on this beast. Perhaps someone who used it when it was relevant would be cool too?
That's a great idea
We kinda saw that on Perifractic's channel, where they took the lightwave models from the Team17 disk and rendered them on the original hardware, then loaded into today's lightwave... Ah it's not quite the same I suppose
I know someone who uses a modern dual-XEON/Quadro PC for most of his gaming related animation work (he's been part of some big productions), but he also uses an SGI Fuel with Maya, Alias and PA because sometimes he does like using the older apps for certain things, especially PA 9.0. Thus, he'll work on some smaller elements on the Fuel, then move them over to the PC for integration into larger models/sequences such as this:
www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/Scene_2_Take.mp4
World's fastest windows 98 PC from the era lol
I always wanted ECC RAM in my win98 PC