http://www.sgi.com/products/5Onyx-Product.html (Silicon Surf Promotional CD, 01/1995)

Onyx Product Guide

Onyx Graphics

RealityEngine2 Graphics Subsystems

Features:

Geometry Engine: the heart of the RealityEngine2 graphics subsystem
12 Geometry Engines Per RealityEngine2 Pipeline- delivers 1.2 GFLOPS of processing power, RealityEngine2 can render 1.6M triangles per second.
Raster Manager(RM) Board: provides the pixel-fill capabilities for the system - Onyx RealityEngine2 supports up to four RM boards per graphics pipeline
40MB Frame Buffer per RM: 4 RM boards allows for multisample anti-aliasing on screen resolutions up to 1600 x 1200. 4 RMs provides an overall frame buffer size of up to 2560 x 2048 and 1024 bits per pixel.
4MB or 16MB of Texture Memory available for all Onyx systems
Fast Fill Rate: 80 million pixels per second, expandable to 320 million pixels per second through the use of four RM boards
Display Generator Board: takes the rendered frames and outputs them as analog video, or as a digital stream to the Sirius Video or MultiChannel Option boards
Programmable Pixel Clock: allows the Onyx to drive a wide variety of resolutions, from 640x480tol920x 1035 and 1600 x 1200
Built-In Encoder: provides NTSC, PAL and S-video outputs for direct-to-VCR recording of an area of the high resolution screen

Alone at the Top

The multiprocessing muscle of Onyx is complemented by the world's most advanced graphics architecture. For the ultimate in graphics performance, users can turn to RealityEngine2, a scalable subsystem that provides the highest performance and most advanced features of any computer graphics available today. Users primarily concerned with processing performance, meanwhile, can turn to the Onyx VTX (tm) graphics subsystem to meet their compute-intensive application requirements.

RealityEngine2: Interactive Realism for Reality and Beyond

RealityEngine2 combines advanced parallel processing technology with custom chip-level integration and up to 160MB of frame-buffer memory. The result is a multipurpose graphics supercomputing platform that outperforms dedicated, single-purpose proprietary hardware solutions at a fraction of the cost. The open systems performance that RealityEngine2 provides is ideal for applications such as image processing, industrial design, molecular modeling and visual simulation. The RealityEngine2 architecture offers the industry's fastest polygon, pixel and vector performance over two million shaded points, lines and polygons per second, with pixel fill rates that can be scaled to 320 million textured, anti-aliased pixels per second. Onyx can be made even more powerful by adding broadcast- quality video input and output options, extra texture memory and multiple displays. Users can configure up to three RealityEngine2 subsystems in a single Onyx chassis.

Copyright Ginko Design, San Francisco

The texturing and anti-aliasing capabilities of Onyx provide the highest level of realism in computer graphics for applications such as volume rendering for medical imaging, real-time digital video effects and military simulation. To facilitate high-quality, textured imagery, RealityEngine2 is available with either 4MB or 16MB of texture memory and supports both tri-linear MIP-mapping and bi-cubic texture filtering. Sophisticated hardware provides multi-sample anti-aliasing without the normally associated performance penalties.

These advanced features place the scalable, expandable RealityEngine2 alone at the top of today's advanced graphics supercomputing solutions.

VTX: The Compute-Intensive Solution

Onyx VTX offers superior price/performance for compute and transform-oriented applications such as CFD, FEA, high-end CAD and molecular modeling. VTX is also ideal for applications that require reduced-resolution anti-aliasing and RealityEngine2-level texture mapping. VTX graphics subsystems provide over one million shaded polygons and vectors per second, and 450,000 textured, meshed triangles. As with the RealityEngine2 graphics subsystem, Onyx VTX offers real-time, multisample anti-aliasing, advanced stereo capabilities, 96-bit color, volume rendering and a 32-bit Z-buffer.

VTX vs RealityEngine2


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Feature             VTX           RealityEngine2 
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Vectors/sec,        1million         2 million         
anti-aliased  
                                  
Polygons/sec       450 thousand     930 thousand      
meshed trian                                    
gles anti-                                      
aliased, textured
                                           
Fill Rate [pix      80 million       80 - 320 million  
els/sec anti-                                   
aliased, textured]                                          
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