Just how fast are these things, anyway?

[David R. Blythe]

In article <558 at rosie.NeXT.COM> daves at martha (Dave Springer) writes:
>I would like to know just exactly how fast a PI is, and all the other machines  
>SGI makes.  When I say "how fast" I mean how many 10-pixel marketing lines can  
>you _really_ get from a client app to the screen; how many 100-pixel marketing  
>triangles can you _really_ get, etc. (this includes GL overhead,  
>transformations, clipping, and so on).  Please include price information, like  
>"On a PI that costs $15,000, you can get 2000 smooth-shaded polygons per sec,  
>with 3 lights".  Obviously I can get some numbers from the marketing  
>literature, but I get enough lies as it is.  Please respond directly to  

>From my experience the "marketing" numbers are pretty accurate, at least I
can get the claimed performance if I sweat over my code for a few hours.
Oddly enough, I noted the literature now rates the performance of a 4D/70GT
at 60K polygons/sec up from 40K polygons/sec.  The result of crafty microcoding
and new gl primitives?
	-drb