Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

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98 GRAPHICS up electricity for no good reason. To set up a scene for use with Screamer Net, the user loads it as usual in Layout, then brings up the network panel using the SN button found in later versions of Lightwave. He or she then has to go through a ridiculous sequence of initialising the Alpha chip (fair enough). clicking on buttons to send the scene, object, and image data to the Cobra, another to tell it to load the scene, and a final button to start rendering. PREFERED ASPECTS Separate buttons are available to send just the object, image or scene data across in case changes have been made to one of these since the scene was last sent to Cobra, but though this is useful, a batch render option would have been much more welcome. With the machinery and software at your disposal when using Lightwave on the Cobra, it's very frustrating not to be able to give the beast a long list of scenes and tell it not to bother you until it has finished them. ARexx scripts could be used to automate things. so why didn't NewTek take this option? A second complaint is the amount of time the Cobra chip sits idle, even dunng rendering, while the data is passed between the two machines and written to disk on the Amiga. For some reason. the Screamer Net programmers have made it possible to link up to huge machines with super-fast chips, massive hard drives, and sac Ock.• .ccip EIPCSI MN M O O me moos •or..• . 0 = Weft Cmicl l e t i c . • P . m O h m C m E l . - - -- ---- An 6.•••••.• VAIMPAIMIMM Y A M I d l n . WelaMiP er t Keeping up with the big boo 1, The Screamer Net process begins with a click on the Ind button, which instructs the Amiga to search for available processors on the ethernet connection 2. Nest, the user uses this bank of buttons to send a Scene and its objects and images to the Cobra. This takes less than a minute for most scenes of c In lull operation the Cobra is about 20 times faster than the 68040-based A4000. though some of the performance is squandered by the networking software. Our 62 seconds example was based on actual rendering time Once the PC and Amiga Lightwave programs had finished shuttling data around and writing it to disk, this became 111 seconds per frame, a 79 per cent slow down. Don't get me wrong - Cobra is one mean piece of equipment which at the E7,000 price mark blows Raptor out of the water and leaves all other desktop power stations for dead (it eats Pentiums for breakfast), but the fact that it could be a lot faster with more 0 , U p d a t e S Send Scene Fite r e a m ( E ) L S c reamer Render ) e 4 Screamer Shutdown 1 r L W 1 A performance monitor running on the Cobra under Windows Ni' gives a graphical display of the amount of time the Alpha chip is forced to sit around and wail. The yellow line show. prosios. for activity, which drops to zero for long periods between rendering Screamer ' n i t Amigo Computing NIA Y 1995 (tear fi ll Fillies 3. no fi nal panel is used to load the scene into the Cobra's remote copy of the Light -plus buttons to begin ren- wove dering or shut Screamer Net rdown e n d e r i n 4„ g Any available processors eup to a masimum of eight nwill be shown in this win- gdow and their status is indi- isated. Screamer Net can nUre. more than on. type of e , 1 f___11=2.c_2....-21±11W the control panel processor in two or three neheorkeri machines 5. The individual buttons tor sending image and object likes are useful when you Franc. are experimenting with a scene, and change just a couple of things before rendering again Waiting for CPUs to fi nish rendertng CPU 2 3 4 5 6 T ype A l p h a Send Alt Fites Status Rendering r an e Send Object Fties s e n d Image F i j i --- Cont inue oodles of RAM, and then make use of all this hardware only 50 per cent of the time, For example, the standard Space Fighters scene from the Lightwave samples takes between 44 and 70 seconds per frame when rendered on a 68040 at medium resolution and no anti-aliasing. The Cobra is often slower. Yes, slower. Data can be passed across ethernet connections at megabytes per second, but Lightwave takes 40 seconds or more to grab the rendered data from the Cobra and write it to disk, during which time the Alpha chip is doing absolutely nothing. STAGE FRIGHT Lightwave has always been a bit slow off the mark when it goes into the integrating pixels' and 'writing RGB data to disk' stages, but as there's a version of the core rendering engine on the Cobra and an awful lot of spare space on its hard drive and in its 64Mb RAM, you'd think someone efficient disk writes on the Amiga Lightwave side is something any prospective owner would find as frustrating as I did. Smaller companies and very wealthy freelance graphic artists, however, will see Cobra as a chance to join the big leagues without spending hundreds of thousands of pounds. Indeed, a suitable summary for this product is that you could buy a complete network of machines and software for the price of just one (slower) Silicon Graphics Indigo and one copy of its superb but ludicrously expensive software. Think about it. For the cost of a small business loan. you could be the next industrial Light and Magic. Aduanc Last Frame Rendered: 1 Rog Rendering Time: 1 4 2 s „ IL Frame advance can We set to manual or 1161161111fint as in Lightware, bet Ow independent sotting •WNW when you have arodalease processors- AS they sag al work away on their ease frames, thus reducing waiting periods Independent would have thought it a good idea to p• this excess capacity into service Rendering the frames mentioned above on , the Cobra takes between three and seconds (lings!), which makes it all - more frustrating when the rest of Mir process makes this up to 45 seconds pa ,frame. Until the basic operation c• Screamer Net and Lightwave are changed to make more use of the Alpha chip, the system as it stands is surprisingly inefficient. With more complex frames which require proper ray tracing or more intensive calculations, the efficiency of the sys tern improves, but there's always at least 30 seconds per frame lost, and when yot. render 300 or more this adds up very quickly. Having said that, when you watch a frame which would take the A4000 18 minutes churned out in only 62 seconds by the Cobra, it's difficult not to step back ir awe_ 17 - 1 Eh e bottom lirm Product: Cobra 275AXP Supplier: Carrera Inc Price E7,000 approx Phone: 0101 714 707 5051 Ease of use Implementation Value for money Overall W
!ss .ye Ye he he )er of ed he 1 IY h IS- St OU .ry ch 18 by In Under the sotem spotlight IFX 108 It's Cricket 112 Ruffian Whizz Super Skidmarks 2 Championship Manager Italia Angst Your P55entidi guide to Amiga gaming 114 115 116 120 121 Here at la5t the state of the art 5iM gets the full Statem flight test 104 systErn Hays's Beat The System Want to impress your friends at Shadow Fighter? Look no further with our hints and tips Brutal Paws of Fury A close look at the furry fracas in the pipeline from Gametek Shiny pates i n a fun strategy game designed by Creative Edge Lost Eden System searches out paradise, coming soon on the CO32
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