SGI is in terrible shape, any bets on when they’ll finally go the way of webvan? (they died this week). It’s sad, really. At my first job, back in 1995 at the NRC in Ottawa, my desktop machine was a bright purple R4K Indigo, and it opened my sheltered little mind to the world of computer graphics and UNIX. IRIX just worked, from either a programming or a user’s point of view. Yet it didn’t have to be an arcane machine to master - if needed, system administration could be done graphically with the Indigo Magic Desktop. What a concept. You can’t say any of that about Linux then, and you still can’t really say that now. (GL via the GLX extension? Get real!) Combine that with the fact that they had the best 3D graphics hardware anywhere, and SGI had absolutely no reason to lose.

Fast forward 6 years: they have $120 million in the bank, yet they lost $80 million in the last quarter. NVIDIA is completely wiping them (and everyone else) out in graphics hardware, and just where the hell is MIPS nowadays? (MIPS was the subsidiary of SGI which made the CPUs driving SGI workstations. It’s also the only chip that I could at one point actually write passable assembler for. They’ve apparently since been spun off.)

All I can think of is how they better not take Alias|Wavefront down with them when they tank, because we (the entire high end computer graphics industry) would be screwed.

They showed Final Fantasy at Pixar today. Square used RenderMan and the RenderMan Artist Tools to render the film, and so over the last two and a half years some technical support issues from them have crossed my desk. Being the only other all CG movie done mostly with RenderMan (besides Pixar’s movies) of course I have been eagerly anticipating its release. So how was it? As expected, the graphics were just incredible. Everything else was just disappointingly abysmal. The plot was pretty thin - I suppose it was exactly like the video game series, some of which I’ve played. The pacing was awkward and stilted. And the dialogue - oh man, did they have to recycle every single action movie cliché they could find?

But the graphics were just.. incredible.