William said:
Back in the '80s when I worked in Salt Lake City, I did some work with
Evans & Sutherland. They did flight and auto simulators. At the time
they used PDPll's for their visual work. I think their sims used around 8
monitors, cost around a couple million dollars and took up a room
to run.
Cool. E&S, now that's an old name in graphics. I believe quite a few
of the
current-day ATi and nVidia employees came from E&S. They made a
multi-R300
solution not that long ago, according to XBitLabs.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/misc/picture/?
src=/images/video/crossfire/radeon_simulator_bg.jpg&1=1
And now I can get the same thing on my desk, less the hydraulics and
enviro room. Wow - how far we have come.
Of course, the hydraulics and enviro room contributed much to the
cost of
the system.
In early 2006 I did some work with CAE to certify a
Level-D
simulator update. The biggest cost-drivers are the simulated
airspeed,
altitude and flight control forces, all of which must be within
single-digit
percentages of the real aircraft.
There are a few companies that actually make hydrolic systems for pc
simulators, they run about $2k if I remember No up/down but
left/right forward/back and seat rumble (last one not as good as it
should be)
As for this card MINE,MINE,MINE all MINE (im a GREEDY coward)
Not even looking at the benchmarks yet but way less power drain,
DX10.1 (NVIDIA where ARE you?-no date from them maybe feb/march)
Plus this is suppossed to be a mid range card means I can jump from
my 1950 to this card for christmas at a price I can scrap together.
Come January with Vista SP1, and I will be caught up (except I do
need to go to a 22"wide (my 19" is stuck at 1280x1024)
