SGI Octane Upgrade and Test Driving a 1997 Graphics Powerhouse

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Today we get to try out the Octane from Silicon Graphics Interactive, and we don't just test it, we also beef it up with some huge upgrades from SGI Depot. Maya, OpenGL, Lightwave and Blender are just a few of the technologies and applications which benefited from the SGI series of machines and we try out as many as possible today.

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[GeFeldz]

3Dfx was founded by ex-SGI employees and 3Dfx GLide (i believe GLide was the official 3Dfx way of writing it in the early days, but that could just be me remembering it incorrectly) was 3Dfx's own API based on OpenGL. 3Dfx later became 3dfx and GLide pretty quickly became Glide IIRC. Oh the nostalgia of my original and early Orchid Righteous 3D, the early version making an actual audible click when going into 3d mode... That click was pretty loud as well and it was just such a very satisfying sound.The click was probably from some sort of relay on the board, but that click combined with the animated 3Dfx logo just plays on my nostalgia guitar strings!
The Orchid Righteous 3D was, i think, the first 3Dfx Voodoo graphics board. It was glorious!

[wsippel]

Useless information: The architect behind IrisGL and OpenGL, Dr. Wei Yen, was also the Nintendo64 lead architect and created the GX graphics library, a proprietary Nintendo dialect of GL optimized for games. After the N64, he and a few of his colleagues left SGI to form ArtX, the company responsible for Flipper, the Gamecube GPU. ArtX was then purchased by ATI, with Wei Yen then serving as member of the board at ATI, and was a big contributor to ATIs legendery 9800 GPU. Wei Yen was also a member of the board at Monolithic Systems, the company responsible for the 1T-SRAM memory used in Gamecube and Wii, founded AI Live, the company that did the middleware for the Wii Remote, and he also led Acer's cloud division, which handled Nintendo's online platform in the Wii days. He was also president and CEO of iQUE, Nintendo's distribution company in China at the time. I think he completely left the field roughly ten years ago, and hardly anybody ever heard of him, but he was incredibly influential back then.

[RussellRiker]

"As with everything SGI did, it's all turned up to 11" - Best quote of the day. Thanks for a wonderful video.

[AndrewCampbellLojinx]

I developed software on SGIs in the mid 90s. Absolutely loved working with IRIX, wonderful machines in their day.

[angryDAnerd]

Back in the 90's I read a lot about these machines and how they were used to create movies and 3D videogames. It was a dream that someday everybody could have a computer with this level of creative power. Now we are in the future, and seemingly limitless computer power is available to everyone for very little money, but the dreams of a future world also seem to have disappeared because there is no contemporary equivalent of SGI to show what a good future would be like and to inspire people.

[kippie]

Yep i worked on SGI in late 90's to 2001. it was a big deal. Was for engineering stuff, fluid mechanics and differental equations. One was the slab and the other was a honking night stand on wheels. thanks for the tour.

[FarrellMcGovern]

I used to work for an SGI dealer. I was their "IRIX" person, as I did Unix. I loved playing around with the workstations when I had the chance...One of my favourite demos was the tumbling asteroid with the particle spew...it was later used in the opening credits for Star Trek: Deep Space 9. You can see both the demo reel segment and the opening credits in the links below...

SGI Demo Reel:

Star Trek DS9 Opening:

[DVRC]

Blender is born on Amiga as TRACES, then evolved as Blender on the SGI Indy. The first version was 54k of C header files and source code.
Anyway, SGI is maybe the most badass company that ever existed

[povilasstaniulis]

Considering when all of this was made, this hardware is just insane. The software was light years ahead of it's time as well.

[RonLaws]

Fun fact: XFS is still in use today in the Linux Space and is the Default for RedHat Enterprise Linux.

[JoeBetro]

I remember seeing the Silicon Graphics demo on Bad Influence and being in awe. My mind is blown that a few years later, I’m watching this on essentially a super computer multiple times more powerful and that fits in my pocket. Thanks for documenting so beautifully these machines which were built by pioneers and which ultimately paved the way to what we are blessed with now. Magic! 💫

[mapesdhs]

Couple of points about the IRIX and Octane...


If anything I would say IRIX is very plug & play, in that just about everything the OS was ever intended to support is already known to it, so most of the time one can install a hw option and there's no need to do anything, just reconfigure the kernel and reboot, in most cases just reboot (the GigE card needs a reconfig, but the QLA12160 and dual-serial card I put in the PCI Cage don't). Some options do require separate drivers, including most of the video I/O boards, but certainly not a clean reinstall.


As for changing a gfx option from one to another, again one doesn't need to do anything as long as one is using the same generation of gfx, eg. SI, SSI, MXE, etc. are all MGRAS, while V6, V8, V10 and V12 are all VPro. Thus, in this instance, upgrading to MXE required no changes, just power up and it's ready to go. If one changed from MGRAS to VPro though (eg. upgrading from MXE to V12), or vice versa, then indeed one must reinstall some key libs in miniroot inst, but only bits of the IRIX eoe, X libs and gfx demos, no need for a full reinstall (this has no effect on installed apps or user data). One just reads in the original relevant CDs (or from disk as I do), enters a couple of commands that mark for reinstallation any item that needs to be changed, let it run and that's it, reboot and it's done. Complete reinstalls on SGIs are rarely ever necessary. Mind you, if one was running Flame on such an upgraded system then of course one would have to replace the Flame config file with the relevant alternate version, and likewise if then installing video options such as the DM2/DM5/VBOB, etc. then those do need drivers. That btw is why I erred towards MXE and DIGVID, as setting up an Octane2 with VPro and video options is a lot more involved (the VBOB alone is enormous and it needs quite a few cables, plus a DCD card and V12; alas I have no V12s atm).


Re the PCI options, as is so often the case with such tech, there's sometimes a relevant caveat or gotcha. In this instance it's the bridge chip that converts between XIO and PCI. Although the PCI bus is 64bit @ 33MHz (the usual max theoretical 267MB/sec), the interface ASIC doesn't work that well and thus over a single PCI link can't do more than about 187MB/sec. However, it does scale well across channels, I've managed almost 600MB/sec with an Octane using four different XIO ports and a bunch of QLA12160 HBAs, and 700MB/sec should be possible if I didn't use any gfx at all. For its time these rates are enormous. SGI btw fixed the ASIC design for the Fuel/Tezro systems and XIO2, they work better and support much faster PCIX at up to 133MHz aswell.



Re the dual-port FC card, that model is a copper card with 100MB/sec per port. I cannot offhand remember though whether the connection through to the host is direct XIO or if it goes through the same XIO/PCI conversion ASIC mentioned above, though with a max 200MB/sec it wouldn't matter that much anyway. Neat part about FC is very high scalability; an original Flame/Smoke setup I obtained from one TV studio in Leeds had two 15-bay FC units, each filled with 73GB 10K FC drives, for 2TB total. That was a heck of a lot back then. A Smoke Octane I bought from BBC Belfast had a similar FC array filled with 36GB drives. In Flame/Smoke of course one would define at least one disk in each Stone array to be a parity drive for data protection. Atm I have six original Discreet systems (three Octanes with Flame/Smoke, a Tezro with Smoke, an R4K/250 MaxIMPACT Indigo2 with Flint, and an Effect O2).


Hey Neil, pity you didn't show the Huge Engine Model, with transparency - one of the more impressive textured demos. :) Did you try out DI_Guy, F18, Matterhorn, Macau and the others?


Ian.


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[MichaelOglesby]

Studying digital 3D in the late 1990's, I remember Lightwave, Maya and SGI pretty well. SGI machines were the best you could get, but they were ludicrously expensive, well out the reach of a student budget. The software applications weren't cheap either, and us students had to resort to piracy to get the applications. Other 3D software used at the time were 3D Studio Max (PC only), Infini-D, Alias Sketch!, Extreme 3D and Cinema 4D. The hardware I used at the time was Apple Macs, running on a 603e or 604e CPU and render times (in ray trace quality) were long... very long. Things got better when the PowerPC G3 CPU was released, but by then, I had moved on to other things.

Fond memories studying 3D, creating worlds, creating textures. You had to double check everything before you did that final render, because if there was a mistake, you would have to wait another several hours for a rerender.

[PissBoys]

Holy shit, Lightwave 3D, I remember using a pirated copy on my home computer running Windows NT in the early 2000’s, and having to run a render overnight for a five second clip. Those were the days.

[kdaddy]

Just getting to see machines like this running is a dream come true. SGI is the stuff of legends.

[hcddbz]

The SGI was also an IO MONSTER! we used as enterprise Backup Servers.
The amount of high speed tape drives and networks on could attach to the SGI was great. The XFS file system was fast and incredibly reliable . XFS had cluster aware, had it own volume manage and you could do snapshots with it. Features that are now coming to others,

[goodiesguy]

You deserve much more subscribers and views.

Your relaxed and friendly style is absorbing and welcoming.

[quantass]

Folks, THAT is how you professionally produce video content. As always, Neil, great work. I'm still floored how modular and thought through SGI's hardware is. Those poor in-house engineers but then again at the time i'd imagine they all were over-the-moon creating never before scene technology to really drive performance, stability, and modularity. What exciting times it must have been not unlike the first railroad tracks being laid down across unknown lands and the thoughts of its future potential! Neil, keep doing more SGI content.

[namelesske]

XFS is still rocking today! Very fast under Linux.

[TahoeMtnMan]

Love the trip back in time. I had friends who worked at SGI and took a Irix Sys Admin course on the SGI campus in the late 90s. I am not a graphics professional but do appreciate how you presented the Octane. We ended up using a Sun SPARC at that time and I hope you can find a similar age Sun SPARC system to show off. Keep the videos coming!