Finding a lot of the hardware isn't difficult, I suspect you mean it's expensive..

You're not going to legitimately get hold of the software unless you have very deep pockets. The systems were used for professional broadcasting, so it will never be cheap.

For SGI go to www.nekochan.net. Bear in mind that there are a *lot* of SGI configurations. Also for the most part SGI systems are slow, hot, *very* noisy, and specialist. Mostly they're only useful for Irix, OpenBSD, other BSDs and Linux may run on some models.

Your best option is a Fuel with vPro graphics (relatively modern), an SGI Indy (old), or an SGI O2. The O2 is the most flexible for the lowest cost but performs all geometry on the CPU, so yes, you'll be able to grab live video and use it as a texture on an object, but running a browser will be unusable. I compiled Xorg on a 200MHz R5000 SGI O2 once and it took a week. Things like Quake are also slow because they haven't been optimised for the platform, and Irix does not ship with a compiler or libraries, so developing Irix applications is also difficult.

If you hunt around on ebay you may find a cheap SGI O2

Sparcstations - not difficult, again slow, hot, and fiddly with various configurations (SBus cards, fibre channel disks, etc..). If you want to stick BSD/Linux on the system instead of SunOS/Solaris, you may have to change graphics card (the OpenGL cards have still not been documented)

SGI was the only hardware to have any form of decent modeller mid 90's. On the x86 I used to use TruSpace and Lightwave for CGI-ish stuff. Maya (the industry standard at the time) was only avaiable on Irix (SGI) until about V2 iirc. Unsure, but by the time Maya v2.5 came along, I was on x86 using it.

In terms of CGI, it was SGI all the way then. 96/97 x86 started showing it could perform the same for a fraction of the price.
For CAD, Sun was popular, but come 98 AutoCAD R12/13 was available on x86, and again SGI (can't speak for SUN but suspect it was similar) no longer had a USP other than all the customers they already had (Legacy). Begining of the end for them. I certainly noticed the migration away from HP apollos and SGI to Dell and Compaq around that time.

SGI hardware easy to get. The software, not so much. FlexLM licensed software even less so. And you can't buy/discuss how to get/sell Irix proprietary software on nekochan (historic reasons, possile litigation or something like that).

There was CAD around on x86 (One of the first beyond basics programming books I got is called https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-CAD-G … s/dp/0830693599, I got it in 99, but shows CAD was around on 286's etc) which was published in 1989 o.0 so there was certainly software available for this, but if you look at the capabilities of x86 (and the OS that was available) in early/mid 90's, then look at an Irix desktop and SGI hardware (large full colour displays 24bit fully accelrated OpenGL, SGI invented IrisGL, the precursor to OpenGL) its easy to understand why SGI was a far more superior solution for these kind of CAD/CAM/CGI problems back then. And in the case of the O2 (1996), it uses a Unified Memory Acrhitecture which allowed a program to use the RAM for VRAM... about 80% (or 700MB or texture memory!) so these were serious machines with non standard hardware, written for serious business. It can run Quake, but thats not what these machines were made for, so its not necessarily great at it 😵

On x86 (older versions):
TruSpace (my fav, real shame it MS baught it and it went defunct),
Maya,
Cinema 4D
Sofimage XSI
Lightwave
3DS max wot! no strike through?... 3D Studio Max
Vu-despirit (terrain generation)

On sgi:
Maya
Houdini
Softimage
lots of other bespoke stuff like compositors etc specifically for the film industry.

Amiga:
I used something called Imagine 2.0 iirc. Very slow, but my first true exposure to how 3D works. 😀

[EDIT:] In terms of cards on x86, 3Dlabs were good and usually talked fondly of (early wildcats had sizable texture mem). Post TnL boom, you can't go wrong with a Quadro. I used an ATi fireGL after reading an indepth review in ComputerArts magazine, side by side they showed the improved tessellation evaluation (the edges of the polys met up, no gaps between triangles), and then I was sold. Of course once I had it never really noticed (although it was probably there) much, once rendered you couldn't see them anyhow. My first experience of TruSpace was with an ATi Rage128 Pro 😀 And it worked fine, although no complex scenes! 😀

Before it went 'Max', '3DS Max' was known as '3D Studio Max', and before that, just '3D Studio'.
The DOS version was always '3D Studio', the Windows versions were the 'Max' versions.

One nice thing about Solaris, however, is that if you have one of the 64-bit SPARC machines (Ultra 2 or later), you can legitimately get Solaris 10 for free from Oracle. While it likes having a lot of RAM, it will still run on any supported SPARC machine. I used to have quite a few of them, but the only ones I have left are a v240 rackmount server (plenty useful, if loud as hezmana) and a Blade 2000 workstation (surprisingly capable - think dual-Athlon-MP-class performance, better in some cases).

As for 3D software, Sun was always playing catch-up with SGI in that field, but IIRC things like Maya and SolidWorks were available, and modern Blender still runs on Solaris, even SPARC, though getting it to build may be a little fiddly. The devtools for Solaris used to be available for free (Sun Studio 12), it may still be. Open source dev tools - the gcc suite and all its associated tools that are familiar from Linux and BSD - work on Solaris too, though there are some issues mixing libraries built with gcc with those built by Sun Studio.

Ok. I am starting to get a general idea.
Hardware, particularly the proprietary stuff, is not hard to find, but can be expensive.
Software seems very difficult to find.
For late 80s-early 90s, SGI was it.
PC was also an option, but didn't really catch up until the mid 90s.

Now a few more questions!
On PC, what sort of graphics cards would I be looking for? I know that Firepro and Quadro are the ones now, and were starting in the late 90s, but earlier than that is seems to get a bit complex. I know there were the Diamond FireGL and even earlier Fire series, and the Elsa GLoria and Winner cards. I've also seen that sometimes there would be separate cards for 2D and 3D, often using the VGA feature connector (more in the 386 era I believe).

I think in the glory days of DOS and 3D Studio, all you had was (S)VGA, so the usual Tseng Labs ET4000, Cirrus Logic CL542x and that sort of thing.

There's also the REALLY crazy stuff, like the IBM Professional Graphics Controller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Gr … hics_Controller
It was basically a 'computer on a stick', with its own 8088 CPU.
Don't ask me what kind of software would actually support that though, I have no idea.

IBM also made two successors to that card:
First the 8514: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_8514
Then the XGA standard, which never really caught on, because SVGA clones could do most of the same things for a fraction of the price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_displa … 024.C3.97768.29

There's a handful of SVGA clones that have limited compatibility with 8514/XGA, but I've never used it myself.

I've seen the PGC/PGA! I'd love to have an XT with one of those. 😁 Maybe pop in an NEC V20 as well! And don't forget the FPU!
According to Wikipedia, the ET4000 was XGA/8514 compatible. If that is true, that'd save a lot of trouble. Of course, I love screwing with hardware, so I wouldn't say no to multiple different cards 😉

They may even go back further than that. From the book mentioned (High Performance CAD in C, which is alter revision of Supercharged graphics, L.Adams same author), Quadram QuadEGA/QuadVGA cards recommended. There was an Instruction set called PGC (Professional Graphics Controller) which seems to have quite a long time in use (86 - 93) however this was incredibly specialised. PGC compatible cards (while tinterweb lists a number of them) seem to be few and far between. Can't find any PGC coding examples which is a shame because I have an Matrox SM-1024 that I really want to take for a test drive somehow. Someone on nekochan I think looks to be doing some investigation on the Sun implementations of these Matrox beasts (http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=16731279). These were so specialised that only a few programs AutoCAD (very early version), maybe an early BRL-CAD had drivers. There is apparently some GKS PGC driver somewhere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Kernel_System)... but yes, extremely specialised, ergo impossible to find info, let alone examples on these days.

3D studio for DOS 😲 Wow... screenshots look like the biz 😀

[EDIT:] Manual for PGC is available from IBM. Can't find any examples though. According to the PGC standard, 3D calculations were supported as part of the 'API/instruction set' which means, if this calculation was indeed employed by PGC hardware. Its the first 3D 'specific' accelerated hardware you can get for x86. Predating IrisVision (SGI graphics card on x86!). But alas I cannot find examples so cannot verify and without knowledge of the instructions these PGC cards are little more than CGA o.0.

[EDIT:] Failed the race condition with Scali o.0

Of course, you should also make the difference between 2D/3D CAD/CAM vector-based technical drawing/manufacturing software, and 3D modelling software where the primary objective is to obtain pretty rendered pictures (most of the stuff cited until now). The former has much lower technical requirements that the latter because A) wire frame drawings and simple fills were more than enough on the graphical side and B) the parameters required to drive computer aided machinery did not need to be programmed using a graphical interface. If renders were truly necessary, PovRay and other similar software could help with that. Such software was available on PC in the early 1990s already, and much earlier on other platforms.

I had no idea there was a Sun implementation of PGC! Interesting! While I'd love to have a true PGC machine, they are so rare, I doubt I'll be able to.
The late 90s-early 2000s seem like they were quadro territory, as most 3D graphics have been since then. But I'm a fan of the underdogs, so ATi is my preference. I believe around that time we got the first Tesla HPC cards as well? Any experience with those?

I'm looking at both CAD and 3D animation. I just love the look of those retro graphics. Wireframe is so awesome, as is 1990s-2000s cgi.

Somewhere I have have the original 3D Studio for dos (like version 0.99? or something) that was released (maybe leaked?) at one of the Assembly or The Party or somewhere.. around 1991? and somewhere too a copy of Caligari 24 for Amiga.. that later became Caligari TrueSpace from emmory...

and ofcourse Deluxe Paint Animation was a cut down Deluxe Paint II enhanced, I cut many animations on DPA!

Jupiter-18 wrote:

I had no idea there was a Sun implementation of PGC! Interesting!

Ah sorry, didn't mean to imply the Sun cards used PGC. I don't think they would, although it certainly might make some draw routines more portable, and since a lot of those programs bridged platforms, maybe? I have no idea, I have never worked on Sun platforms.

Jupiter-18 wrote:

While I'd love to have a true PGC machine, they are so rare, I doubt I'll be able to.

It's only the card that makes it PGC. Nothing else in the machine needs to be specialised. Although given the nature of the work to be done, an FPU coprocessor is probably mandatory.

Jupiter-18 wrote:

I believe around that time we got the first Tesla HPC cards as well? Any experience with those?

I'm afraid not.

[EDIT:] Sorry misread, are you talking about Nvidia here? in which case tesla cards and the whole GPGPU thing was much later, I couldn't say when, maybe 2007/8+. Others around probably know better. Larrabee was certainly underway by 2007.

BloodyCactus wrote:

Somewhere I have have the original 3D Studio for dos (like version 0.99? or something) that was released (maybe leaked?) at one of the Assembly or The Party or somewhere.. around 1991? and somewhere too a copy of Caligari 24 for Amiga.. that later became Caligari TrueSpace from emmory...

Yes it did. Didn't know they had Amiga software out! Cool.

I've done a few youtube videos of the various SGI options. Talks about hardware not software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4l-KpZv2Og&l … pLUHR7gNHWX_rdW

@spiroyster
Gotcha

I mean the PGC cards themselves. I'd be using a PC XT with 8087 FPU and NEC v20 CPU.

Yeah! I mean the Nvidia Tesla HPC GPUs. I know they were and are used for speedy renderign, and even had a "desktop supercomputer" with one or two 1st-gen teslas in it thatwould link to your PC.

@mwdmeyer
Awesome! I'll check those out tomorrow!

Jupiter-18 wrote:

The PC world is where it gets complicated, especially the early era. Most importantly: WHAT GPU. There are so many options... And with software too.

You can see in attachment results of mine profi cards testing at Dual Athlon MP 2400+ (noone can blame me of cpu limitation 😎 ). Hope that Palcal borrow me some pieces from his collection so i can finish whole line (FireGL 3/4, late wildcats). If i win battle with mine laziness one day i create nice article about this testing.

About your question - depends a lot on Operating system you want to use on PC. All these cards were build for Win NT. If you want use it, you can choose anyone. Few had drivers for W95 that works in W98 too (Elsa), but they missing then OpenGL support and became only expensive high color accelerators. Sadly most of card makers left business before release of Win2000 (because of nVidia Quadro) so you won't find any driver for W2k/XP for most early cards like Diamond FireGL 1000 and cards based on 3DLabs Glint 300. Some Elsa cards have W2K driver, but won't tested them (in WXP don't work acceleration in applications running in window mode).

Only exception are Intergraph cards since Realizm line (1996 and never - after 1999 became 3dlabs). They have universal drivers working in XP. But they have some problems too - its almost impossible find card before year 1998 with texture memory - these were optional, very expensive and still got none in collection. Same is for HP Visualize FX 2/4/6 cards - they had addon PCB for texturing support - but never got HP working under WXP (planning to test them under W2k). With no texturing memory - no games - they run then in software mode. And remember all these cards released before Quadro (2000 and older) missing Direct3D support.

So if you need WXP support or D3D go for any Quadro, FireGL 2 and never or 3DLabs VP any model. If you won't need D3D best will be Intergraph - nice big profi looking cards with good driver support even for XP.

Tested apps - GLQuake 1 and Q3 Arena demo both in 1024x768x32. Cinebench 2003 max score + Opengl Speed up (shows increase of speed when Cinebench use Opengl instead of Software rendering). Rest are results from profi applications included in Specviewperf ver. 6. Fillrate is tested by GLperf3.1.2 - but some cards have strange results (Lightning 1200) and some will freeze (late realizms).

WHOA! That is EXACTLY what I needed!! Thank you SO MUCH!

Great work vlask! I did something similar with the pro cards on my Alpha with NT box with the official AlphaNT Quake II. It was hard to get the drivers, and even a PowerStorm 4D60T (rebadged RealiZm Z25) would do around 15 FPS @ 640x480.

I can offer some input on SGIs: O2's are pretty common but they use proprietary memory which is very expensive and getting very hard to find. 1GB can go for $600 or more through an SGI reseller. I believe they were commonly shipped with 64 or 128mb.

SGI Indy systems are also fairly common but I haven't seen any dirt cheap ones on Ebay for a while, was a time when you could pick one up for under $75 shipped. I don't think they use anything other than commodity RAM, I know the Indigo 2s just use regular 72 pin FPM RAM, those might be your best bet if you were looking to have a maxxed-out system but I suggest getting one with a High Impact graphics option at minimum, preferably with the TRAM module. Max Impact will cost you megabucks these days, as lots of people would strip an Indigo 2 for parts and resell the more valuable bits. This leads to the odd situation where sometimes it is cheaper to buy an entire SGI to get a part in it that you need. Plus you have extra spares.

The software for these systems is very hard to get. You're talking about software that cost $20,000 to $40,000 per license back in the day, depending on what plugins you bought. Blender has an Irix release I'm pretty sure, but don't know what version they stopped at.

SGI Depot is a good spot to get parts or whole systems, or Irix media: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html. Ian is a good guy, I've bought from him before. Another site that has systems and parts is www.mashek.com. You will of course pay a higher price than Ebay but the systems are generally in better condition and you can get a warranty, if that is important to you. The current exchange rate will hurt a little bit at SGI Depot but not as badly as when it was 2 dollars to 1 pound.

PC side, there wasn't much until the mid to late 90s and early 2000's. 3d Studio DOS was pretty much it from 1991 until whenever they released 3ds Max, maybe 1995 or 1996? Memory is fuzzy on that one. I don't remember when exactly Maya and Soft Image became available on PC but I want to say it was around 2000 to 2004. Lightwave may have been on PC as early as 97 or 98, I want to say I was using it on NT workstations at that time but can't remember for sure.

As to what a good workstation for 3d Studio DOS was: a very high end 386 like a 33 or 40mhz system with 8 or 16mb of RAM and 200MB or larger disk might have been what you were using when v1 came out, if you were well-healed. When I first started using v3 a 486-dx2 66 was pretty much the shit, and 3DS was rock solid if you ran it on OS/2. There was a minor performance hit to the interface but not enough for me to really notice. A fast pentium would have been what you'd be using for Max or Lightwave or a dual processor Pentium Pro or Pentium II based system if you had the money, and exactly what part of the late 90s we are talking about.

Before about 1990 or 1991 there really wasn't much available for 3D on the PC. Autocad, Turbocad, maybe other more obscure CAD packages. Povray, of course. Deluxe Paint for bitmaps and such. Nothing really animation wise, other than Disney Animator and Autodesk Animator Pro and I think certain versions of Deluxe Paint had animation features.

Oh almost forgot: there was also Imagine 1 and 2 for DOS, I think version 4 was the highest DOS version? Never used Imagine, I believe it is abandonware now. I know they had a site where you could download it but even that may be down now.

Hope you find this helpful.

Blender still runs on IRIX, actually, though you'll have to build it yourself. There might be a reasonably recent build in Nekoware. It also builds on Solaris, but you'll have to roll your own.

You also might be able to find Octanes and Fuels for a reasonable price. I know I was able to, about six-seven years back, but I wound up having to sell them. They have a fair chunk more power and can handle a lot of modernish things, if that's helpful.