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000729_owner-lightwave-l _Tue Apr 25 22:47:11 1995.msg
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From: blaise@lois.dti.com
Organization: Deskstation Technology
To: justin.barrett@tenforwd.bbs.net (Justin Barrett), lightwave-l@netcom.com
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 14:02:00 +0000
Subject: Re: Questions...
Reply-to: blaise@dti.com
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> From: justin.barrett@tenforwd.bbs.net (Justin Barrett)
> Subject: Questions...
> Date: Sun, 23 Apr 1995 06:54:00 GMT
> Organization: Ten Forward BBS
> To: lightwave-l@netcom.com
> I'm in the final stages of searching for a computer to run Lightwave on,
> and there are some questions still nagging me that will affect the cost of
> whatever I get:
>
> 1: What's the difference between VRAM and DRAM in graphics boards?
> On a related note, can a board with DRAM be upgraded to VRAM?
>
VRAM has two "ports", so that the engine that's putting the pixels
out to the screen can operate in parallel with the engine that's
putting the pixels into the VRAM. DRAM, on the other hand, has to
share its single "port" between both engines. There is a nontrivial
(but also non-earth-shaking) performance difference between the two.
I'm pretty sure that you can't upgrad DRAM to VRAM, because this
would require a card that was decked out for VRAM in the first place.
> 2: Is 16 megs of RAM really enough to run LW? I've seen this as
> the *lowest* recommended amount, but is that even enough?
> Considering that Windows NT takes 12 megs, that only leaves 4
> to work with. How much memory does LW take?
>
My personal religion on this is that you never want to run NT with
less than about 24M. The feedback that we got from our Raptor
customers was that 32Mb just wouldn't do the job for any serious
animators, while 48Mb would take care of things almost all of the
time and 64Mb was a slam-dunk. Bear in mind that this was back in
the days of ScreamerNet and Windows NT 3.1.
It seems to me that an important goal is to balance your
memory and processor power so that you aren't wasting one or the
other. For instance, some suboptimal ways to run Lightwave would probably
be: a RISC processor with 16Mb or memory OR a Pentium class processor
with 64 Mb of RAM.
I might be entirely full of crap on this, however.
> 3: If I get an Alpha system, will I be limited to running only
> Alpha software (as there is a separate Alpha version of LW),
> or will it run regular clone software? I assume it'll "clone"
> just as smoothly as an Intel-based unit since NT has to work on
> it, but I want to be sure of my assumption...
>
Your assumption might be right, but I'd like to rephrase it for you.
You will be limited to running Alpha native software and any WIndows
or DOS application that does not require '386 instructions.
The real answer on this is that almost all shareware apps and most
WIndows applications that cost less than about $500 will run right
out of the box. The applications that cost more money seem to have
spent those incremental dollars on compiling their code to run only
on '386 processors :-(.
The Alpha application base is growing daily, thanks to the tireless
efforts of the Digital Semiconductor group. I have Excel and Word
running on an Alpha system in the lab right now. The Digital guys do
seem to be making some real headway on this, and I'm not just saying
this because we sell the fastest Alpha-based workstation on earth
(shameless plug :-)).
Blaise Fanning
Chief Technology Officer
Deskstation Technology
(913) 599-1900
blaise@dti.com