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I’ve been trying to do this too… I haven’t found a way yet. In fact I had to completely uninstall eoe.sw.optinput and reinstall effect to get dlwacom to work again 😮 I think perhaps you have to unload and unregister the optinput/wacom driver kernel modules with ml before dlwacom will work again, I dunno, I gave up and just run effect all the time.
I have pretty major doubts about you getting enough talent to get this going properly, and I’m not saying I’ve got time to help very much at the mo’, but I am somewhat familiar with ffmpeg and using opengl for video through something else I’m doing. If you ever get a mailing list, stick me on it.
My god, AFAIK there is nothing commercially available to do that kind of thing. Probably you’d have best luck with a monster multi-pipe SGI Onyx with some turnkey software. Good luck… what on earth do you need it for?
Actually you can fit 16 gig in both a Tezro and an IBM-thing. Both OSes can use all of that. At the mo’ I should think that FFI only use up to 4 gig ish. Which to be fair is shitloads, guys… going 64 bit (or using PAE on Linux) would let you use more but also has a slight speed hit. Several percent for PAE, not so much for N64 on IRIX. I would think that work that would need more than four gig would be going to at least a Flame anyway, so maybe Flint won’t even go 64 bit on SGI?
No. 64 bit is not a terribly big deal on Tezro because you can’t fit huge quantities of RAM in the box. BTW, modern PCs can address 64 gigs of RAM using PAE, but again, you can’t fit much in the box.
BTW Tezro does badly in the that test above because it doesn’t have hardware multi-sampling whereas IR and Quadro both do.
Some clarification if anyone cares:
No SGI system* can use system memory directly for textures. They all have seperate, dedicated memory. Octane MXE only had 4Mbytes (sic), Octane2 and Tezro have about 40 for V6 and V10, about 100 for V8 and V12. RealityEngine and InfiniteReality have shitloads, I’m not so familiar with them. Gigs anyway.
The memory line in the config file sets how much system RAM is used to buffer frames, both from the framestore for playback and as scratch space when scrubbing though clips before they’re processed and various other shit.
One of the reasons SGI systems kick shit out of PCs is their fat busses. An Octane has a 1.6Gbytes/sec connection between the graphics and the front side. Tezro and Onyx have at least double that. This means that you don’t need to be quite so worried about running out of texture RAM – frames can be brought in from main memory hella quickly. This was obviously very much the case on MXE graphics, where if you were picky about your textures staying in the TRAMs you’d only be able to have like 3 PAL layers in Action.
When AGP was launched they did say that cards could just use system RAM for textures, but very few ever did. Someone has recently revived the idea with PCI-Express, I forget who. PCI-Express is starting to get close to SGI-style fatness, but for now the crossbars in Onxyes still rule, particularly since they connect everything in the system at that speed wheras PCI-E is only a single pipe. Plus the crossbars have garunteed low latency, proper CRC error correction, and QoS-like reservable bandwidth.
It would be nice to think Discreet (or “Autodesk Media and Entertainment”, eew) will go to SGI Prism, which has double the crossbar bandwidth of Onyx and potentially some extremely fat graphics…
* Apart from O2 which we’ll discount becuase it was shit. You could load a half-gig image and rotate it around no problems, but the fill rate was only 65 million textured pixels per second absolute tops so it wasn’t much use for Action. Trust me on this, I still run effect* 6 on one :-/