Intergraph Corp’s love affair with Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT has not been requited by the market – the company’s numbers are still less than sparkling in its core computer-aided design business, and it just managed to crawl into profit in its most recent quarter, while making a big loss for the year. So the Huntsville, Alabama company has joined the star-struck crowd and now hopes to make its fortune back in TinselTown. The Digital Media Division unit of the company’s Digital Media Division has just come out with StudioZ RenderRAX, a new member of its suite of affordable (by whom?) high-performance Pentium Pro and Windows NT-based systems for the broadcast and entertainment markets. StudioZ Render- RAX is claimed to be the first dedicated rendering engine for Windows NT to pack four 200MHz Pentium Pro processors and to offer this capability in quad-processor modules that can be stacked to create a rackmounted configuration of virtually unlimited CPU power. The StudioZ RenderRAX module lists for $20,000, and is claimed to offer the fastest rendering engine available for content creators rendering complex and processor- intensive models, computer-generated images and animations. Intergraph claims that when used with distributed or multi- threaded rendering packages such as Microsoft Corp’s SoftImage Mental Ray, NewTek Inc Light Wave3D with ScreamerNet or Kinetix Inc 3D Studio MAX, StudioZ RenderRAX is claimed to deliver unparalleled performance in terms of frames per day and frames per dollar. Each StudioZ RenderRAX module includes four 200MHz Pentium Pros, each with a 512Kb secondary cache for optimized performance among the processors; 256Mb of four-way interleaved Error-Correcting Code memory for maximum performance and reliable and protected data; 2Gb of hard disk space and an UltraSCSI disk controller; 10/100Base-TX Ethernet controller on the motherboard and Intergraph’s G95 graphics accelerator for 1,280 by 1,024 true color graphics for rendering, viewing and previews. Up to seven StudioZ RenderRAX modules can fit into the optional 19 40 UI rack, to give the rendering power of up to 28 Pentium Pros. With optional concentrators, multiple RenderRAX units can be run from a single monitor, keyboard and mouse.
