PCs for 3-D: Do You Need a Second Mortgage?

It's a fact that 3-D animation applications are just about the biggest "cycle sponges" you'll find. High-end graphics tax every part of a system: 3-D-accelerated graphics cards for modeling and previews, hard disk space, and processor speed. To preview animations at true TV resolutions, you'll need a hardware-based video recording/playback system.

These hefty requirements have sold a lot of Alpha NT boxes over the last year, but even a Windows 95-based Pentium 133 with 32 MB of RAM will do for a start. A more realistic minimum for experimentation is a P-200, 64 MB, and Windows NT. If you can afford only one upgrade, consider a midprice video display card. You'll find that 3-D applications require a double-buffered display for decent speed; unlike 2-D applications (e.g., Adobe Photoshop), 3-D applications set up one frame while showing another. This doubles the display-card RAM requirements; you also need on-board space for textures. We suggest at least an 8-MB card, which will display a 1024- by 768-pixel picture in 32-bit color with room for textures. Our test equipment, running NT 4.0, Service Pack 3, went well beyond minimum requirements:

• a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 with dual Pentium Pro 200s, 256 MB of RAM, and a pair of Elsa Gloria-L OpenGL-accelerated display cards with 16 MB each
• an Intergraph TDZ-425 with dual Pentium II 266s, 512 MB of RAM, and two dual RealiZm V25-GTs, each with 16 MB of display RAM and a separate 16-MB texture cache
• a Carrera Computers Cobra EV56 with a 500-MHz Alpha, 128 MB of RAM, and a Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 402 display card with 16 MB
• a Dell XPS Dimension 200n (Pentium 200), running Windows 95 and NT, with 32 MB of RAM and an 8-MB Matrox Millennium II or a Number Nine 8-MB Revolution 3D

Even this high-powered hardware can take 10 minutes per frame to render complex scenes. If you're doing big graphics, you'll need big monitors. We used a 20-inch Nanao T2-20 plus the 21-inch Intergraph 21sd107, Compaq QVision 210, and ViewSonic P815, mostly in 1600- by 1200-pixel resolution. We also used the Intergraph InterView 28hd96 28-inch wide-screen monitor in 1920- by 1080-pixel resolution, a truly outstanding display.