Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

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CD-Rom Now reveals all! : t a l l i e s i s 1 1 1 0 1 2 1 1 0 6 1 INamet nil !rem I Ctilmidttl u yeur PC [glaring nrand new Sk1. 1101 an itred fres 1v4 Mrs year s forepeao gampoler 11 Trait Slum ful rotors f fet all Ue !alest games i t ase rearm releases teethe Net and Reading CD-Rom Now can be very revealing. Fascinating reviews of all the latest technological advances, up-to-the-minute news, a gigantic games section, exciting edutairmaent insights, a dynamic demo fi lled disc, plus the most comprehensive buyers guide available. If it's CD we've got it covered. NEED WE SAY MORE? BUY IT NOW! O n Sale 8th May 1 1
1if to th • ISE e all know that 3D ray tracing demands powerful processors, and many Amiga owners would kill for a 68040 to make Imagine, Real 3D or Lightwave really buzz. However, in the big bad world of commercial rendering, even the Amiga's fastest chip Is a non-starter. When a production company needs several minutes of broadcast quality graphics in a hurry, only the Silicon Graphics machines have been able to produce the sort of speeds required. The Raptor (reviewed in our December '94 issue) changed that and gave the Amiga world some big guns of its own, and now Cobra AXP brings top-end professional performance tantalisingly closer. You lege. - but with Cobra you get 64Mb RAM, a 1Gb II hard drive, and the DEC Atpha processor st running at a whopping 275MHz. All ill this in a neat tower system complete with p 14 inch multisync monitor, keyboard, mouse. and Windows NT. a Windows? Yup, 'field so. Cobra runs the y DEC Alpha version of Microsoft's network- a ing front-end and uses its ethernet card to b talk to the Amiga. By running a PC version at o Lightwave's core rendering engine through u an emulated MS-Dos window, Cobra t is able to work in partnership with the CAmiga, even though running under an alien 7 environment, The , Amiga side needs only a copy of Lightwave, 0 NewTek's Screamer Net software, 0 and a suitable ethernet card. With 0 f o r t 5teule &medal tne5 (abra MP and glues - worhi's fastest mittoolo(essor hi s Il m ig a a t a s t e o f t h e the network connections made, the user runs Lightwave then uses the Screamer Net panel in Layout to initialise the Cobra, send data to it, and collect the rendered images it sends back TECHNICAL HITCHES It sounds easy, and when everything is up and running it is, but getting to this stage can be a minor nightmare. To be fair, we were testing with a beta copy of the Screamer Net software and an alpha test copy of the Lightwave engine on the Cobra side, and we didn't have the benefit of an automatic installation routine you'd find in a finished product. When the quirks are P la(25 :O W l00 frame This animation would tato over 21 tours to render on the A4000 and a Cobra would race through it in only 2.2 hours, but without a batch option, overnight rendering would waste tit least six hours of precious UM. The sample t•xtures example scene renders in 17 minutes 50 seconds on an A4000, and only 1 minute 41 seconds on the Cobra. That's a 964 per cent speed increase! Amiga Computing MAY 1995 GRAPHICS ironed out, there's no reason to believe that the Cobra won't function as a virtual plug-in-and-go machine, but for the moment the user is faced with a lot of messing around with host names and IP numbers before the ethernet side of things is happy. With full release versions of the software, Screamer Net in particular, users will hopefully find that this part of the initial setup procedure is taken care of behind the scenes. Once operating, the link between the two machines works very reliably and it's possible to mess the system around without confusing the network. Worry-free handsoff reliability is important when you might want to leave the machine rendering overnight, though this kind of operation does expose a few damning weaknesses in the Screamer Net software. The scenes which make up a complete 3D animation don't all have to lake hours and hours to render, not even with the Alpha chip. but Screamer Net is mostly manually operated and has no facility for batch processing. This means that if a large scene is set to render overnight it might take only a few hours, after which the Cobra and Amiga are sitting idle and using Alpha prO(P5501 When the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) began work on its 64-bit Risc chips a few years ago, they were only the latest in a long line of companies who had trodden the reduced instruction set path. By 1992, however, the DEC Alpha had been recognised by the Guineas Book of Records as the world's fastest microprocessor. and it gets faster all the time. Full 64-bit from start to finish, the chip is capable of up to two CPU instructions per clock cycle, giving the Cobra a maximum theoretical performance of 550 millions of instructions per second (Mips) compared to the A4000's 18 Mips. What's more. because DEC had just dropped development on their failed Prism processor, they decided the next family of chips would have a 25-year development life, which means the current chips could end up running at over 1000 Mips. 97
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May 1995 41k Images w 500 Ham image
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