Onyx RealityEngine2 demo

[@EdinburghGuy]

SGI's engineers wanted to make PC level boards. It was SGI's executive who had the attitude that Hollywood would always buy SGI regardless of the cost. When, 3Dlabs and 3Dfx brought out the first 3D graphics chips, SGI's engineering group left to form Nvidia. I did my Honours years project in 1991 using a 24-bit programmable graphics card (Hercules Graphics Station Card). With a bit of assembly it could Gouraud shade triangles.

[@MarsBorg]

The TV program was called Bad Influence

[@sonicfeet]

The metal texture the host mapped on the Beethoven model is the same texture used for Metal Mario in Super Mario 64.

[@whigmalwhim]

yes, SGI was involved in that too

[@chelovek-jpeg]

I noticed that too :)

[@THE______TRUTH]

Its crazy how far we have come. Our phones can do this. Insane.

[@NuGanjaTron]

Fones R b0ring

[@shimmy1984]

@@NuGanjaTron R b0ring headphones

[@m1omg]

People write "lol" but guys, this was in 1993. A typical home PC could run Doom only at 10 fps at the time. This is 1999 level graphics on a 1993 computer. Imagine year 2019 graphics rendered on a refrigerator sized supercomputer and you'll see what the fuss was about this,

[@candycabngfl]

Two great rivals in computer graphics, Evans & Sutherland and GE Aerospace/Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin/Real3D, from the late 1960s, through the 1970s and 1980s, into the 1990s. Their flight sim hardware was unrivaled.they provided SEGA and NAMCO with the means for 3D polygon + texture-mapping graphics technologies in the early-mid 1990s with the System 22 and MODEL 2 arcade boards, sometime after Sega & Namco started with flat-shaded polygon graphics with the System 21 and Model 1 boards.

[@qgyu]

I had one of those by my desk. Each RE2 board had 16 (IIRC) i960s, and you can have 4 boards inside an Onyx. That's on top of the 4 MIPS CPUs. 7200rpm SCSI Barracudas had just come out, and tops out at about 4GB while the 9GB Seagate was a 5400rpm 5 1/4" full height drive. How time flies.

[@NuGanjaTron]

IIRC the deskside accommodated 2 raster manager (RM5) boards; the rackmount monster took up to 4. I loved the turnkey switch and the LCD on the panel; the older PowerSeries did without those.

[@UncleFeedle]

Good to see this again. I remember watching it on its initial broadcast and being in total awe at the real-time reflection mapping. Today I do 3D modelling using a fairly mid-range graphics card that, as well as reflections, also delivers real-time texturing, bump, specular, normal, displacement, antialiasing, HDR lighting and shadowing, on models infinitely more complex. Most of what Andy Crane is showing here can today be done on a cheap laptop. The pace of advancement has been unbelievable.

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Now it can be done on a cheap $50 phone.

[@topy706]

are you still alive?

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

Good for you 👍

[@earthwolf82]

Very impressive for the day. Was running an Amiga 500 back then and it would have been absolutely demolished by this monster.

[@qwertyiuwg4uwtwthn]

3:41 so THAT'S why the trees in Super Mario 64 are like that as the same with the player models in-race in mario kart

[@alejandrooro9932]

Planes that always face the camera

[@chelovek-jpeg]

This technique along with sprites is used in any game

[@MOSMASTERING]

Quarter of a million quid to make it look like you've dropped a pebble into water.. Cutting edge, man! Still.. I watched this TV show when it was on at the time, I loved computers back then, everything was so new and exciting.. kids don't know today what they've even got and everything we had to go through to get to what we have now.

[@jessed0308]

So true

[@ReddoFreddo]

I remember reading a review for Half Life 2 where the reviewer said something like "Basically computer graphics won't get any better than this, of course computers will be able to render more complicated stuff in the future, but this is the end of major visual changes in computer graphics" He was kind of right

[@johntrevy1]

@@ReddoFreddo In all fairness the Source engine just happened to age very well with its constant updates.

[@Pwn3dbyth3n00b]

It's crazy how this was half a million dollars back in the day but with that same amount of money into hardware with current tech you could have something that renders a Marvel movie.

[@videosuperhighway7655]

Hopefully one day we will have this amazing technology at home.

[@Bammer2001]

1:54 This reflection texture is actually the texture used for Metal Mario in _Super Mario 64._

[@c__c]

amazing how far we've come with computer graphics in the past 25 years or so, i'd love to see this compare with nvidia's titan V, the best commercially available graphics card on the market, as most of SGI's team went to Nvidia

[@kuntosjedebil]

His explanation of texture mapping is just phenomenal: texture mapping means that it maps a texture. But I don't blame him. Information was much harder to come by back then.

[@mapesdhs597]

I created a simple description back when the N64 was still in development (I had the first ever web page on the N64, or Ultra64 as it was known at the time): www.sgidepot.co.uk/tex.html Blimey, that page is over 20 years old... time flies...

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

Hardly anyone outside the business knew about the technical details and terms, so it would be next to useless or just bewildering to speak about it in detail on a TV show in the mid 90s.

[@Bigtooly]

the future is now

[@kemita]

+Peter Smith And people take it for granted.

[@dom3827]

do i see a kiddy cry?

[@sammythesnake1986]

@@dom3827 No, it's a kiddy smashing up technology.

[@candycabngfl]

Been a long time fan of SGI and have owned and used a Personal Iris, an Indigo and later an O2. Silicon Graphics was not a pioneer of 3D graphics, they simply refined and marketed it more successfully in the 1990s. Evans & Sutherland was doing in the 60s and 70s what SGI was doing in the 80s and 90s. It really is amazing stuff to go back and look at today :-) Both companies almost got into the consumer card market. The cards they offered were way ahead of anyone else in the market at the time.

[@mapesdhs597]

E&S technology is very different, based around hw "eyepoints". What SGI developed was general purpose advanced 3D technology, and that really was totally new. You can't run a medical thick slice stereo visualisation app on an E&S vis sim box.

[@asklepios1523]

brick beethoven that's what I needed in my life.

[@greasebob]

Slightly better than N64 quality at 3:35-- in fact, looks incredibly similar to N64, albeit with higher resolution..

[@hubzcaps]

greasebob yo dawg. open a n64. R4000 gpu. same as in these...most games were made on indys. similer spec

[@greasebob]

N64 had R4300i chips while Onyx had multiple R4400 and up. But yeah it was definitely designed with similar tech, just much less bandwidth and number of parallel processors on the N64. Still very impressive for a $200 machine to even remotely resemble anything a $200,000 machine could do.

[@Maru96]

Daytona USA looks better than both

[@DavidKingNT]

In fact, the N64 is just like the SGI Onyx but at lower scale.

[@guys-in9vd]

the refloextion texture at 1:50 is used in sm64

[@qwertyiuwg4uwtwthn]

yep metal betahoven x3

[@mike4ty4]

"Video games have pushed the computing more than anything.. I think SGI underestimated the potential of their hardware and probably not prepared to do with it what NVidia did.. SGI came as a result of the failure of Tron and the intense cost of cooling crays, but with the failure of SGI came NVidia.." Do you think it would have been possible to have gotten their hardware down to the cheap cost of today's, if NVIDIA and Microsoft weren't here, and SGI didn't make the mistakes it did?

[@ZILOGz80VIDEOS]

It sure is crazy how much performance you can get out of an ASIC when it comes to graphics. Just look at what Quantel was doing back in the day.

[@6or7breadsticks]

+Ｔｈｅ Ｃｏｍｐｕｔｅｎｔ If each game cost $100 more and came with its own videocard they would look so much better

[@ffsForgerFortySeven.9154]

Sitting here with what would be worth trillions back then based on that first price range ……. I often have fantasy's of myself walking into a room in the late 80s with something like I have now and blow em all away

[@Diamonddavej]

I wrote a final year project on 3D visualisation in 1996. I predicted that people would soon stop buying SGI, they would instead buy cheaper PCs with 3D graphics cards. Cheap 3D graphics cards killed SGI.

[@blacklotus808]

This is literally the video what got me in to CGI, i'm still doing it to this day, i'm 43 years old not, talk about nostalgia.

[@essentialatom2]

It's 2012. And I'm watching this and thinking, 'Woah, that's amazing.' This is because it's 1:53am.

[@Digi20]

Crazy, 5 Years later, that 180kg quarter-million dollar monster got smoked by consumer grade gaming hardware for a thousand bucks.

[@blackflagqwerty]

Is there anything texture mapping cant do?

[@thegreatagitator4675]

blackflagqwerty It even slices, dices, and makes thousands of julienne fries!

[@CompatibilityMadness]

+blackflagqwerty It can't make a "non-flat" stone stairs/walls (tesselation/highcount triangle model are needed), Can't make a water splash when something is dropped into water (fluid simulation), Last but not least : It can't do shadows as good as they should be (shaders/raytracing). Basic flaws : U must "bake" everything needed in advance (low res. textures will look ungly). It hogs memory bandwidth and VRAM capacity like nobody's business.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Those reflective surfaces were done with environment mapping. That deals OK with single reflections, but it can’t cope with reflections of reflections. To accurately model light and shadow (reflection, refraction, diffuse bounces etc) you need a ray-traced renderer. Which becomes much too slow to do in real time. And there is the difference between high-quality renderers and those used in video games.

[@mapesdhs597]

CM, that's why IR4 had 1GB TRAM and 10GB VRAM. ;D There's actually a lot one can do to approximate some of the things you refer to, and SGI did develop various methods to achieve a number of volumetric and other effects using texture mapping, including a more accurate and dynamic version of environment mapping (textures are not precalculated in the usual manner for E.M.) I worked a fair bit with volumetric data sets on Onyx2 systems for customer demos, mainly medical. Not as good as native voxel technology, but very impressive for the late 1990s (check out the Visual Human project). SGI also developed data paging methods that could cope with huge datasets despite having limited VRAM (eg. ELT), and of course they had he hw to load very big data sets very fast (Group Station for Defense Imaging; even the old Onyx2 version could load a 67GB file in just 2 seconds). Ian.

[@lunchie80]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 one year ago, ray tracing was much too slow to do in real time. Now the Rtx cards are out and it is now reality! Except for all the whiners who have no concept of just how amazing real time ray tracing really is and what it means for graphics in the future.

[@unarei]

very accurate walkthroughs of buildings. Wow have graphics gotten better

[@gbarrancos1]

2:57 - Remember Mario64 Game Load Screen ;)

[@alejandrooro9932]

Mario 64 was made in a SGI i think

[@uitham]

Metal mario in super mario 64 also used the same flower texture for the shinyness, and I used to wonder why they used flowers for that

[@thiscateatspancakes2451]

This is actually amazing, considering the year. if you're geeky af, you'd love to own this. I'd love to own this old huge computer >:D

[@edgarantoniocastrosoto]

saludos desde los mochis sinaloa mexico yo uso autocad 3d desde 1995 saludos

[@OpticalHaze]

02:57 it does look like the MARIO 64 Start Menu....

[@VVM2024]

1:50 Metal Mario texture

[@ratboyOwO]

nintendo made all their N64 games on SGI hardware. the graphics chip in the N64 itself was made by SGI.

[@TheWaynelds]

trendy catchphrases? Im just wondering what the W coordinate is since the texturemapped images are only 2D.

[@humansrants1694]

2022 and still haven't worked out how to make phone calls on a DSLR camera.

[@Jebbidan]

Imagine having onyx back then in the 90's

[@mike4ty4]

It's amazing... now we can realtime-render graphics of much greater detail on much smaller computers with today's CPUs and graphics cards, that cost a tiny fraction of what this thing did.

[@Kennephone]

To put this in to perspective, the onyx is capable of 300-500 megaflops (according to my research), supported up to 4gb of ram, and cost a quarter million dollars. The geforce 210 released in 2009 is capable of about 44 gigaflops, came with 1gb of ram (ddr3 model), and cost under $50. Even the geforce 3 released in 2001 is about as powerful as the onyx, albeit with only 64mb of ram.

[@candycabngfl]

Evans & Sutherland was ahead of almost everyone, including Silicon Graphics, during the 1980s.Only one company in the world could match the graphics prowess of E&S, and that was General Electric Aerospace, that was bought out by Martin Marietta in 1993, and merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form Lockheed-Martin, and they setup a company called Real3D in 1995.

[@mapesdhs597]

True for vis sim, at first. SGI caught up and surpassed them by developing 3D tech that could be used for all sorts of tasks, not just vis sim. That brought costs down. SGI though didn't really get the ball rolling with this until POWER Series and Crimson came out, and then especially with RE/RE2 and Onyx.

[@babyplaze]

lol looking back on technology like this makes me chuckle when i see games like Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield 2 because they look absolutely riduclous. Were no longer in the realm of using our imagination to make games look like real life, weve almost got to the point of photo realism :)

[@sinHHHans]

that's what cryEngine 2 and Unreal Engine 3 will look to us in a about 10 years ^^

[@NuGanjaTron]

@guitarguru2006 Um, when was the last time I saw an Onyx(1) on eBay? 3 or 4 years ago?

[@Andarus]

Consoles are still not able to do that :o

[@Eeshank2]

+Andarus top kek

[@kuntosjedebil]

False

[@mattizzle81]

My smartphone can do that, with 10x the performance easily.

[@KamiKitsuneVA]

Uh no, it can't

[@mattizzle81]

@@KamiKitsuneVA You sound so sure of yourself. My Note 9 has roughly 700 GFLOPs floating point performance, and this has like 2. What are you smoking??? So uhhhh... Yes it can rofl

[@TheWaynelds]

no ive heard of UVW mapping before, but i just dont understand how a 2D texture map can have 3 coordinates.

[@Membrane556]

Not sure if we'll see as much advancement in the next ten years as we seen since the SGI Onyx because have things really have slowed a lot recently. My latest PC is nowhere near the jump in technology from what I used in 1998 a powermac 9600 was from the very first computers I used a COCO3 and Amiga 500 even though both happened in the same amount of time. I think Moore's law is running out of steam that or software is getting really crappy.

[@artdude8278]

this was what Nintendo used to make Super Mario 64.

[@KamiKitsuneVA]

They did use SGI hardware, but you are incorrect. The SGI Indy was used for N64 development

[@mike4ty4]

So how does this have to do with the development of the graphics _hardware_ we have in today's PCs, which is what enables all that graphics power?

[@NuGanjaTron]

It has _everything_ to do with the evolution of graphics hardware. This is the direct precursor. The capabilities have exploded, but the basic architecture is the same. You can literally see the cores (as we would call them now) laid out in individual chips on the RE2's boards. The 4-5 massive boards in this box (each weighing close to 1kg) are now integrated on a single chip these days. And then some. Also, today's OpenGL is derived from SGI's IRIS GL API used for these demos.

[@p00x39]

This is texture mapping. It maps textures.

[@Tha1DJPLex]

Reality Engine, now in Direct X

[@hananezumi]

What year is this from?

[@magermunson]

SGI Infinite Reality demotape from 1996 here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fpuxYZeJmLameZI

[@Mazut0]

It's funny that just within a few years, the Unreal engine came and could do all the stuff shown on the video even better thanks to the 3DFX voodoo

[@emanu1674]

And today we have realtime ray tracing

[@user-il1sh5mh8y]

What year is this?

[@dvamateur]

Is it running Irix maybe? Anyway, these days these things can be done on a PC (running either Windows or Linux) or a Mac. Using a PC seems kind of cheesy compared to using a Siligon Graphics machine. Similarly like using an Emulator II sampler was much more cooler than using a cheep looking PC to do the same thing. Anyway, good old days in that only fully qualified people had access to powerful computers. Others would say these were bad days for the very same reason.

[@TheMadisonHang]

final fantasy 7 i think used this machine alot

[@MRTuning704]

And now some more game reviews

[@TheWaynelds]

It's only UV coordinates. Not UVW.

[@flatt3r]

"It's a UNIX system! I know this!"

[@matthew65536]

what os did those run?

[@kayeplaguedoc9054]

Irix. It's a proprietary OS used by SGI.

[@free2sap]

IRIX, SGI's own blend of Unix :D

[@hubzcaps]

Matthew Berry irix

[@sinHHHans]

6 years to go!

[@300maze]

:)

[@mememe84]

From wat year is this?

[@diegosilang4823]

1993

[@Mekose]

@sinHHHans Holy shit, that idea blows my mind.

[@mememe84]

did SGI have its own OS ? I am not sure what OS is used by this guy on the computer

[@eudatux23]

Sorry that I took so long to answer, the OS shown is called IRIX

[@SeñorDossierOficial]

1:56 OwO

[@AntiProtonBoy]

hahah, I downloaded the source code for some of those demos, particularly the ripple and rubber effect

[@mike4ty4]

"We probably would have had to pay for it.. " As in "pay $40,000". That's crazy. It's great good graphics technology is available now at so more accessible prices. However, it's not so great that it's being closed down, and the PC being "dumbed down", so once again a true "general purpose" computer would cost sick amounts of cash.

[@humansrants1694]

Imagine showing this guy a phone.

[@cplpetergriffin1583]

He owns one now...

[@techntools]

In 1993?

[@c4keizerg354]

@@techntools well hes living in 2019 now

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Yeah, hard to believe that a cheap ass $50 phone today can shit all over that monstrosity in 3d graphics. lol

[@JulianPersival]

How is called this tv program?

[@mattdud]

"Bad Influence". Sorry for the slow reply.

[@Fernandosampaio_]

metal mario texture there 1:49

[@qwertyiuwg4uwtwthn]

1:54 guys i found the metal mario texture xd

[@shivoo23]

and the price was only ???? 1.000.000 $ ?

[@kayeplaguedoc9054]

Around $250,000 from what I can find.

[@mapesdhs597]

Quite a lot more than that for a decent system, though the desksides started at around $60K. The 24-CPU RE2 rack in my garage was originally $1.5M; after a number of owners, I bought it for $400. www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/pics/onyx00.jpg

[@TheWaynelds]

@Treisprazece True. I would love to find a version of Alias/Wavefront Power Animator, just to play around with it and see what doing CGI was like back then, compared to now. Wolfenstien 3D is actually not 3D. They used 2D tricks, like in DooM, to fake the 3D stuff, or "Virtual Reality" . Like scaling textures, or for instance, you couldnt have a room on top of a room and the enemies were just 8 directional 2D sprites.

[@Chrysalairus]

But can it play crysis

[@dominicmgm]

Yep... at an ultra cinematic 0.000000000001 FPS.

[@mike4ty4]

"Yes, I think Microsoft would really rather everyone leave the programming to them. " However I'm not so much talking about _soft_ware as I am about _hard_ware. As whatever has happened we have gotten good computing _hard_ware at much better prices.

[@dudemiester75]

This must be the oldest vid on youtube 17yrs ago!!😂

[@CaseyTaylor138]

WHOA TEXTURE MAPPING

[@mike4ty4]

"Thank god Microsoft stole SGI's technology while SGI execs were gullible enough to do a deal with Microsoft.." Microsoft? I wasn't aware they were in the graphics hardware business.

[@n00blamer]

Well, in hindsight we all know they were. =D

[@myradioon]

Here is another SGI video demo from1990 I uploaded. kzbin.info/www/bejne/h4DTkIKug8l0pbc

[@TheWaynelds]

yepperz. i bet you forgot about this didnt ya? DIDNT YA!

[@h.h.c466]

03:20 This is photoshop! Seriously I am astonished of the coding skills /libraries then.

[@mrjustin5]

For such a super expensive computer is only 200x faster than an average computer? Price/performance cost is pretty low... but then again, there wasn't much else that would do these types of effects and rendering in 1995. I was in 10th grade when this video was made.

[@rapper250]

Now show this guy a rig with: an i7 5980x, 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and 4 titan X in SLI.

[@2911oscar]

+rapper250 show me a 5980X

[@sneakybutpirate]

+2911oscar I laughed too hard at that

[@hubzcaps]

rapper250 dood he be like wtf bro how the ...3000 mhz ram. holy bawz

[@haitham172208]

Oh man how is time is running so fast , now my iPhone is more powerful than this ultimate powerful workstation !

[@KamiKitsuneVA]

True, but iphones can't handle stuff like this.

[@mapesdhs597]

And they can't do 48bit RGBA, or support real-time response for mission critical apps, etc.

[@benjimaestro3775]

But can it run Crysis?

[@Shadow77999]

1 frame per year

[@iLikeTheUDK]

Danm, if John Carmack would've seen this back in 1996, I have no idea how awesome would've Quake 2 looked a year later...

[@happysappy7851]

And it only cost $500,000!

[@geovani60624]

He said one quarter of a million, so its 250.000

[@geovani60624]

@Mee Omi but he is not talking about today's money

[@Tony-dq5bz]

RTX -> ON

[@Shadow77999]

where are the game reviews? reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[@babyplaze]

@sinHHHans shit man this is so true, we will look back on games like Modern Warfare 2 and Crysis in 5 to 10 years time and think they look horrific compared to what will be out in the future.

[@LonnieLawless]

Well now, it has been close to 10 years babyplaze. Now what is your opinion on said games??

[@sonofhendrix]

This man says its 200 times faster than a PC... Well the SGI Onyx RealityEngine2 = 2,640 MIPS. My Core-i5 PC processor = 120,000 MIPS. That's 45 times faster than the SGI.

[@sminkycorp]

MadMax You really are a fuck. This is from 199X

[@thegreatagitator4675]

+MadMax Your conclusion is ripped out of context.

[@redbeardedt3437]

+MadMax I'd like to see an i5 from 1993.

[@elpatriotaLX]

+MadMax Well, today SGI makes super-computers... I think these SGI's could outperform your i5. I am not 100% sure though, I'm just guessing.

[@thegreatagitator4675]

ElPatriotaLX The newer SGI Altix models for sure.

[@HHGFHJGFHJGFJTYFJDGY]

Nintendo 64!!!!