kubota vs e s freedome more people have been asking for information on the kubota graphics workstations so here is some more info on the kenai denali vs the e s freedom here is the text of a denali vs e s freedom done by d h brown associates denali bears a strong resemblance to evans and sutherlands freedom graphics subsystem in several aspects of its high level design both products use a parallel array of processors for geometric computations both have a pixel router to connect this front end to a second array of pixel processors as a result denali and freedome overlap significantly in performance and functionality both design teams also appear to have similar philosophies with respect to modularity scalability and market penetration there remain however several important differences between the kpc and e s products evans and sutherland designed freedom as a high end developer s dream system with plenty of performance potential and flexibility in its favor freedom has configurations from two to sixteen floating point units a border range that starts and ends at a higher price and performance levels than denali all freedom systems include a large fixed number of pixel processors that support a broader variety of color blending functions the freedom design treats its entire image memory as general purpose memory allowing developers to allocate it on a flexible basis to a number of special purpose applications finally e s provided freedom with very flexible otput and video integration features for multimedia and simulation applications note that kpc is working an auxiliary board for ntsc and pal output that will not require an external video encoder e s programmable output features however will remain much more flexible the kpc design team in contrast made denali more of an end user s system entry version have better performance range and flexibility than low end freedom configurations and come in at more realistic mainstream price points denali does not need as many modules as freedome because it uses a deeper scan conversion pipeline to support each one resulting in better cost performance characteristics although both products provide strong support for d imaging and volume rendering kpc recognized that not all users will want an even mix of these capabilities denali s configuration flexibility allows customers in effect to purchase geometric and pixel processing capabilities separately and to upgrade them separately as needed both companies have implemented hardware texture mapping at workstation price levels as a way to attack sgi s more expensive vgxt and realityengine systems the only other products to provide this capability kpc supports point sampling and bilinear interpolation of textures in hardware but provides only software support for the higher qualtiy tri linear interpolated mipmapping method on balance however denali provideds bettern overall texturing capabilities than e s for most applications aside from being much more affordable kpc solutions deliver more parallelism for texture processing and more off screen memory for general graphics data storage by implementing texture mapping on its transformation modules e s foces customers to move very quickly to higher price levels to obtain better texturing performance kubota avoids this problem by linking texturing to its frame buffer modules providing a lower cost more scalable solution hope this helps brian ps this was reprinted without permission for the full text please contact kubota
