SGI Octane Upgrade and Test Driving a 1997 Graphics Powerhouse

[Music] hello cave-dwellers welcome to part two about to part SGI octane series if you haven't seen part one yet a link should appear up there somewhere so go and click on that and in part one we learned what this machine is and what it was used for you also may have noticed that it was my first experience over using an SGI machine I'm not familiar with the hardware and I'm not familiar with the operating system that runs on it I learned lots in part one and I intend to continue our journey here in part two where we'll get hands-on with the operating system so consider this to be a slightly less formal and more relaxed episode than part one but first because I want to solve to get the absolute most out of this episode I think we should put some hardware upgrades in getting the very most out of the octane was with huge thanks to Kai who not only donated the original machine but he's also dropped into the cave for a glorious unboxing and also an evening of beer and curry which was a real pleasure so thank you to Kai and to Lu as well for dropping in the books itself was sent by Ian from SGI D Pollock code at UK who I highly recommend for any SGI needs you may have the majority of this is on loan to help us give you the bigger picture on just what this machine could do but Ian did kindly throw in some donations for me to keep such as these original SGI speakers and they do raise the question can we retro break them if we take the battery cover off here you can see that the color has changed somewhat nevertheless they're an extremely cool accessory to have the box is stuffed full of SGI goodness and i can't begin to imagine how much this would have set you back in the late 90s but we're talking house buying money here 10 of thousands of pounds of high-end equipment just look at all so just what could we add to the octane well options include this PCI adapter so you could add a regular PCI card to the system in this example it's a Gigabit Ethernet adapter and you can see on the left-hand side covered over is one of those very delicate connectors that we saw in part one so I'm very cautious working around all of this equipment another option would be a single or dual fibre channel card like this one that would have made short work of shifting large files on a network or accessing fiber connected peripherals this wasn't unique to SGI of course but on the octane we had a theoretical maximum data throughput of 800 megabytes per second on the crossbar switch that we met in part one that's about three times as fast as a 64 bit 33 megahertz pci bus on a pc of the day so yes using fiber on a regular PC was possible but certainly not of these speeds if video production is more your thing then perhaps you're like this this is a digital video I o card to PCBs here stacked up one on top of the other and as many BNC inputs and outputs as could be squeezed into the back of the card this thing is packed full the cart has three ribbon cables on the side and these hook directly into the main video card much like the feature connector on an old pc video card for example but once again everything is turned up to 11 here thus just how SGI did things speaking of video cards I was already pretty impressed with the card that we had installed in part one but it was missing something crucial that this operated board has and that's texture memory our machine slowed to just a few frames per second as soon as it tried to render textured graphics in real time and so this an MXC card will address that and we can see what difference it makes this hunk of metal here has witched between it to our 12,000 CPUs and each is clocked at 400 megahertz so we're putting a much bigger engine into the octane today than we already had and it'd be interesting to see what difference that makes in 1999 you might have had something like a Pentium 2 3 3 3 CPU at home as we learned in part one our SGI CPUs are RISC CPUs and not sisk like a Pentium so clock speed alone isn't a fair comparison it's all about how efficient the CPUs are per clock cycle and of course how well the software is coded to take advantage of that you can never have too much memory so we've got an extra 512 megabytes of RAM to throw in all of the memory of course is ECC or error correction code RAM this type of RAM is used in servers and machines with high value data those ECC features protecting against data corruption and memory errors will have a shade under 1 gigabyte of RAM in total which is a long way off the eight gigabytes that you could put in this machine in the late 90s and there are more upgrades on the desk to show you and we will come back to them but I think right now we should get the parts installed for our demonstration so we can get lots of hands-on time with the machine and show you what it's capable of [Music] [Music] so with the system board on the table we added the extra RAM removing some smaller modules to make way for them and reattaching the bracket to secure them in place as with most things that bracket was an optional extra and then in goes the new CPU module I do wonder these days if we get more money for the amount of scrap metal surrounding these CPUs than the value of the CPUs themselves but I love how weighty and solid everything is in this machine you just know you're working with high-end equipment from the period [Music] we then threw in the new MXC video board and while I don't know yet if I have any equipment I can demonstrate it with we also installed the digital video board just because it hooks directly into that video board with the Flex ribbon cables so let's install it while we have the video board going in and we'll see what happens [Music] let's start with AI ryx the operating system then and it's not one that I've used before I had the octane but it doesn't take too much getting used to our capture is a 1280 by 1024 resolution but our new configuration appears to support much more than that if we check the display properties here we can take it all the way up to 1920 by 1035 which would fall under the category of HDTV resolutions in IREX Silicon Graphics produced one of the most stable full tolerant operating systems available which was perfectly suited to the job required of it SGI had become dissatisfied with the Bell Labs file system that was implemented in UNIX and created their own EFS or extent file system in 1985 it was light years ahead of anything available at the time supporting two gigabyte file sizes and eight gigabyte volumes in 1985 if you were lucky to have a computer with a hard disk then 20 megabytes would have been a luxury let alone an 8 gigabyte volume later on SGI created XFS in 1993 and that was a journaling file system which likewise was over-the-top being a fully 64 bit file system at the time when 32-bit code was still in its infancy in the PC landscape supporting file sizes of 8 exabytes which is still mind-boggling to conceive in this day [Music] our octane here runs the very last release of Eric's from 2006 unlike Windows Linux or Mac O's it's important to note that I ryx is not a plug-and-play OS this means that when you install any hardware into a system such as a different graphics board you can't expect it to just work support for it must be built into the kernel which usually means installing IREX afresh you'll notice as I click around the folders here just how smooth everything is and that's because everything you see is fully hardware accelerated everything ties in with the iris GL or OpenGL extensions for him more on that shortly so we have an OS which is fairly intuitive and easy on the eye yet hugely powerful geared towards real-time disk and graphics operations and supporting the huge scaling operations that SGI offered sometimes taking machines to more than 1024 CPUs it was also one of the first unix versions to have a graphical user interface with the desktop metaphor and here's a really interesting technology that came out of it I Rick's is the originator of the OpenGL library used in graphics processing which is still in development today OpenGL started out as SGI zone proprietary graphics library called iris GL but thanks to pressure from its workstation competitors such as Sun Microsystems and hewlett-packard SGI released an open-source version and named it OpenGL in 1992 the proprietary Irish GL would continue to be supported for some years so as not to break existing dependencies and upset customers but ultimately OpenGL was a future and would even see it on our own home pcs competing with other libraries such as 3d FX's flight and Microsoft's Direct X to try and become the standard graphics library on our pcs and we have eirick stew thank for that of course how well OpenGL runs depends on how powerful the hardware underneath it is so let's revisit the iris 3d demos before and after our hardware upgrades distort is a little demo in which you manipulate an image in 3d when we click on this dog we should be stunned by 3d effects that's not just in an image it's a texture on a plane in 3d space and as we have zero texture memory it runs well it runs like a dog of course this is a real-time demo and not a slideshow it really is that slow switch now to our upgraded system and run the same demo and well what a difference a bit of texture memory makes is now silky smooth it's a basic example but nonetheless a clear one and just what a difference or video card upgrade has made how about something more complex remember that flights him that I showed you in part 1 and it's slowed to a crawl when the textured mountains came into view [Music] well the foot is truly on the other hand with texture memory all turbulence has gone from our airplane and our framerate is beautiful [Music] and finally while we're looking at real-time rendering let's play some quake on our original system using software only rendering it was less than impressive but it was quake and it was at quite a high resolution using the CPUs only so some credit is due but switched to the OpenGL version of quake and do not adjust your set this isn't a screen shot if you watch carefully you can see that it's still rendering a single frame we're talking frames per minute and not frames per second here is that ludicrously slow as it wrestles with the textures but if we switch to our mxc video card that's more like the quake I remember it's still oh so very Brown but it moves much more smoothly I don't however want to dwell on quake or quake 2 or quake 3 all of which run on this system as fun as it is to see them running it's just not what it was made for and thankfully we've got a few good applications installed now to show you the true power of the machine so while I prepare that lets hear from anthony who used an octane for his work and shares with us a few of his memories of the power of the octane hello Neil and hello fellow cave dwellers my name's Anthony and I first came to contact with the octane two in the mid to late 90s I was working for a video facility and they purchased a flame and smoke system now this is by discrete logic in Montreal in Canada and it was part of the suite of products you had inferno which is a top one flame Flint fire smoke I think that's it I miss one probably but you get what they would do with the product line anyway it was absolutely state-of-the-art composting stuff attached to it was some fiber channel storage that was incredibly quick it was able to record and playback uncompressed video in full 444 in 12 bits and it was like the most responsive buttery smooth thing you could ever use it really was fantastic particular at the time it also featured an absolutely wonderful 3d compositing interface that was able to receive lights and 3d models and projections and all playback in real time it was an absolute one to behold and of course clients absolutely loved it and so they should it came it a whopping quarter of a million pounds to buy so quite the investment anyway things move on and of course other systems are now more popular things like After Effects and nuke but you can still find flame in use today all around the world on TV commercials TV programs and feature films in fact if you go to Autodesk comm forward slash flame you'll find a demo there on Mac OS and that's sort of a port of the linux and unix versions as they were back in the day it's still a Prada that's available on Linux and Mac and you'll find both flavors in facilities as I say all around the world and I should know because it's my job anyway thanks having me on Neil and thank you to Anthony for sharing his memories of using the SGI obtain and flame and flint and all of those other applications and he gave us a great real-world example of the use of this this fiber this is a dual channel fiber card and he was explaining how he used it to work with uncomfy - video in a silky smooth fashion thanks to the throughput of the card and the octane with its crossbar switch so just like OpenGL flame and its related products continue to be developed and used to this day so the legacy of our SGI octane lives on let's take a look now and see if we can find any more examples of such applications on our octane here an old man then of the 3d rendering world is a light wave 3d which first appeared in 1990 and have't ran this thing out on my amiga 500 and boy was it slow but impressive nonetheless and it was used in everything from babylon 5 to men in black The Dark Knight to Spider Man rendering here at 752 by 480 pixels so in NTSC DVD quality for comparison the 180 frames of this spaceship are rendered in about 32 minutes and I'll speed that process up now so you can see all of the frames why I really like about this is that you can choose how many threads you'd like to assign to the task and the operating system remains nice and responsive the remaining resources are yours to use without fighting light way for them can you imagine trying that on Windows 98 the thing would have had an absolute meltdown working in real time on the models is a joy too as you can see with this Hummer which definitely needs those wheels adjusting there that looks good and those guns they need to be bigger much much bigger there we go working on a single octane like this in the late 90s it was great but chances were you'd have had a lot of big iron behind the scenes acting as a render farm to help speed up the process but as a standalone graphics workstation is still a very impressive little beast two decades later and well progress marches on of course this present-day installation of Lightwave 3d running on a modern PC does look very familiar and of course we're getting more frames rendered in less time thanks to modern CPUs and GPUs in our desktop PCs but we are rendering using OpenGL so we still have SGI to thank for that and of course to keep everything in context imagine your modern-day desktop PC was now a hundred thousand euros pounds or dollars of specialized equipment geared specifically towards this task and not a sub thousand-pound gaming PC that is what you were in possession with with the octane for all its seriousness though the SGI engineers weren't without a sense of humor and clearly someone was a fan of spinal tap by inputting the switch spinal tap at the command line when you open the audio mixer our mixer now allows us to take the volume all the way up to eleven instead of only ten now I can really test out my SGI speakers specialist 3d software aside you may also be surprised to know that Adobe published software for AI ryx with versions of Photoshop Illustrator and Premiere catering to what must have been a very small audience in comparison to their Mac and PC market but no doubt they were a very grateful audience and if you absolutely must use some software which is only available on Windows well I found this this virtual instance of Windows speeds along on the octane so you can get your fix of minesweeper or Microsoft Excel [Music] but I think that's quite enough of that let's get windows off of our octane thank you very much now my tour of the system didn't exactly go to plan Mayer is another 3d application first released in 1998 which I'd love to show you but well I appeared to be lacking the required license so here's some clips of that in action it was essentially the amalgamation of 4i ryx based applications the advanced visualizer Explorer power animator and alias sketch his development was completed in close collaboration with Walt Disney during the making of their computer animated film dinosaur and it was with Disney's input that Mayer became what it did a firm favor in the animation industry it was later bought by Autodesk in 2005 and continues to be updated and released today being used notably in Lord of the Rings Ice Age and Star Wars Episode two but here's a piece of software I got working that you may have heard of its blender another 3d application which is still in development today so let's render the demo scene for you here blender dates back to the mid 90s and it here SGI a hardware in 1998 when it was publicly released as freeware it would go on to become an open-source Community Supported project across many platforms amassing such features as soft body and fluid dynamics to create ever more realistic animations and all the while utilizing once again OpenGL the last thing I wanted to do is to show you our video capture card and there were frustrations again there sadly I couldn't get the application to run even though I'd managed to dig out some cables that would work with it so that's something I might have to spend some more time working on and maybe with Ian's help over at the SGI Depot I can get this running and I can bring you some clips of that in the future instead then we'll enjoy the fruits of our texture Ram one last time with this flyover of Hong Kong [Music] [Music] room testing the octane then has been an interesting and slightly mixed bag for me I'm certainly impressed by the legacy it's left of both in its hardware and its software software like OpenGL Mayer and other 3d applications which were either developed before and continued to develop on the octane before moving on again or started life on the octane and similar SGI hardware of the period and i'm really impressed with the flexibility of the hardware something we didn't look at earlier which was on the table is this this great big box of tricks is yet another PCI adapter we have the single card PCI adapter over here well this lets you put three in this cage and then slot it into the back of the octane we've got another ethernet card there a scuzzy card and some comport in there so you can just about put anything and everything that you need in the octane to suit your needs but despite all this I'm also left a little frustrated and it's not any fault of the SGI octane it's my fault entirely giving me this is a bit like giving me a slide rule and telling me to go away and design concorde i just don't have the skills to sit down and create a 3d animation for you in Lightwave or blender or maher if I could get it working and show you really the power of the machine in the hands of a true artist and a true professional the hands of people like Anthony who we saw earlier in the episode today I'm holding this up against a modern-day desktop PC with a gaming video card installed it's very easy to look at things like the modern installation of light wave we saw earlier and say you know what's so special about this but of course everything has to be kept in context I'm sure your modern electric car would put up a good fight against a Ferrari f40 but if you look hard enough your modern car owes a debt of gratitude in a firm handshake I think you'll find for the performance features and indeed the safety features although if we're talking about an f40 maybe more performance than safety and likewise your modern desktop PC owes a debt of gratitude to machines like the octane Ian it's a very DNA runs through the software that you use today like OpenGL and the hardware like the rise in CPU by AMD which has its own cross bar style switch built right into the chip I've certainly enjoyed exploring the octane today I hope you've enjoyed spending some time getting to know it with me and remember it's just a small part of SGI's long and illustrious history so hopefully we'll get to revisit some more of their machines in the future until next time a special thank you to Kai - Anthony - Ian at SGI depot and to everyone who's helped me to explore this machine and helped me along the way until next time thank you for watching good bye if you enjoy my content and would like to toss a coin into the hat to support the cave then check out patreon.com/crashcourse as you can see on the screen now thank you for your support [Music] [Music]

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 121,380

Keywords: computer hardware, computer history, computer history documentary, computers, gamers nexus, nintendo 64, nostalgia, octane, octane2, pixar, restoreation, retro, retro computer, retro man cave, sgi crossbar, sgi depot, sgi octane, sgi octane 2, silicon graphics, teardown, tech, upgrade

Id: T8rdJy4TLCs

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019