Silicon Graphics Inc, Mountain View, California has upped the ante in the super-high performance graphics market with the launch of Iris Powervision, a family of new graphics supercomputers in its Iris Power Series. It claims the new graphics architecture in the Powervision system, is the first to unify interactive geometric processing and image processing, while maintaining full binary compatibility with the rest of its line. Powervision is claimed to up the three-dimensional graphics performance of its high-end systems two to 10 times, with performance of 1m polygons per second, 1m anti-aliased vectors per second, and 1.5m anti-aliased points per second. Features include real-time anti-aliasing of polygons, vectors and points; real-time texture mapping; real-time special effects for fog, motion-blur and full scene progressive anti-aliasing; and a suite of imaging functions. Aimed at image processing, visual simulation, molecular design, animation and creative graphics, Powervision is offered from June as a complete system or field upgrade to the existing Power Series product line. Powervision system prices begin at $94,900 for the Iris 4D/210VGX with a single MIPS RISC processor rates at 20 MIPS, 8Mb memory and the graphics subsystem; it can grow to eight processors. The price to upgrade from a GTX system is $40,000. At the same time, Silicon Graphics has cut prices on its Iris Power Series. All Power Series GTX graphics systems fall up to 21%, server systems up to 36% and memory by up 50% to 67%, with the 4D-210 GTX falling to $74,900 and the Power Series 4D-210S server cut to $34,900. IBM licensed low-end Personal Iris 4D/20 graphics for the RS/6000.
