Some questions...

[Chuck Musciano]

     I am the proud new owner of a 4D/50GTB, and have been having lots of fun
coming up to speed writing graphics code.  Here are some general questions
I have which others in this group may be able to answer:

	How can you see exactly which graphics hardware you have?  The
	manuals mention using "hinv", which says nothing about graphics
	hardware.  "hinv -v" doesn't say anything more than "hinv".

	Are there any papers/references which describe how the rendering
	engines function?
	
	Which format is fastest when sending vertices to the graphics pipe,
	shorts, ints, floats, or doubles?  What is the internal numeric
	format of the pipeline?

	When can I expect my copy of 3.2, with the Personal Wavefront package
	on it?  Can I just get a copy of the Wavefront stuff in the meantime?

	Is anyone at SGI going to proofread those manuals?  They are rife
	with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors.  While I like the
	nice binders, accurate text is even nicer.

	Are there really 256 vertex limits on the polygon and tmesh routines?
	I drew a tmesh with 1200 vertices with no problem.

	Exactly which combinations of colors and Z values are required on
	a 4D/50GTB to get czclear() to do an optimized clear of the frame
	buffer and the Z buffer?  The documentation is very confusing.

	When I run "gr_osview -a" to see what the CPU spends its time
	waiting on, it seems to be spending 100% of its time waiting on the
	graphics FIFO to empty.  Is this really the case?  Does this mean
	that the machine is at top rendering speed?  I was under the
	impression that the graphics hardware is much faster than  the CPU
	in the 50, and that performance could be gained by just adding a
	faster CPU, like in a 4D/70 or 4D/80.

Well, I suppose that's enough for now.  Also, many kudoes to SGI, for making
the system so easy to unpack and install.  After fighting to get the OS
installed and configued on Suns, it was a dream to boot the machine, give
it my NFS tape, let it get everything set, change two files, and be up and
running!

Chuck Musciano				ARPA  : chuck at trantor.harris-atd.com
Harris Corporation 			Usenet: ...!uunet!x102a!trantor!chuck
PO Box 37, MS 3A/1912			AT&T  : (407) 727-6131
Melbourne, FL 32902			FAX   : (407) 727-{5118,5227,4004}

Gee, Beaver, everything that's fun can get you in trouble.  Haven't you
learned that yet? --Gilbert