Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation is putting together a $150,000 NT-based graphics system, a price point reminiscent of the high-end Unix boxes that for years made it the Rolls Royce of the computer graphics industry. The box, code named Harmony and scheduled to be ready by mid 1997, will be the high end of a compatible family of three-dimensional graphics systems that starts with the Mitsubishi-designed RealImage accelerator unveiled in August and due to ship next month. RealImage is a chipset version of what was once Evans & Sutherland’s unsuccessful line of Freedom graphics accelerators. Harmony will include both a front-end Pentium Pro workstation and a separately housed image generator built around a symmetric multiprocessing SMP Pro architecture and custom graphics acceleration chips Evans & Sutherland is now co-developing with Mitsubishi Electric Corp’s new Silicon Valley semiconductor design house VSIS Inc, which did the RealImage chipset. Harmony’s target markets will include flight and ground vehicle simulation, digital television and highly realistic content creation. The target market is broader than the high-end university and scientific customers that used to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for Evans & Sutherland’s Unix systems. Evans & Sutherland promises Harmony will outstrip any real-time graphics system introduced to date. It’s going to do things like optimal texture sharpening on a pixel-by-pixel basis, Phong shading and optimized depth buffering. Harmony will be able to generate HDTV high definition television images in real-time and be software-compatible, thanks to OpenGL and NT, with the $2,000 RealImage boards. Meanwhile, Evans & Sutherland has also come up with a software package to produce and manage synthetic environments created with its NT- based graphics systems. Integrator NT enables graphics databases to be created, stored and shared across all members of the Evans & Sutherland product line, which is to grow next year with offerings that fit between RealImage and Harmony. The Integrator package, which will come bundled with all Evans & Sutherland accelerators, hooks directly to a long list of graphics software design tools ranging from Softimage to Adobe Photoshop.
