SGI VPro
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VPro (also called ODYSSEY) is a computer graphics architecture for Silicon Graphics workstations. First released on the Octane2, and subsequently used on the Fuel, and the Tezro workstations.
VPro provides some very advanced capabilities such as per-pixel lighting, also known as "phong shading", (through the SGIX_fragment_lighting [1] extension) and 48bit RGBA color.
There are currently four different VPro graphics board revisions, called: V6, V8, V10 and V12.
The first VPro series cards were the V6 and V8. The main differentiator being that the V6 has 32MB of RAM and V8 having 128MB. Later, the V10 (32MB) and V12 (128MB) were introduced. The main difference with the new VPro V10/V12 series is that they had double the geometry performance of the older V6/V8. V6 and V10 can have up to 8MB RAM allocated to textures, while V8 and V12 can have up to 108MB RAM used for textures.
The VPro graphics subsystem consists of an SGI proprietary chip set and associated software. The chip set consists of the buzz ASIC, pixel blaster and jammer (PB&J) ASIC, and associated SDRAM.
The buzz ASIC is a single-chip graphics pipeline. It operates at 251 MHz and contains on-chip SRAM. The buzz ASIC has three interfaces:
- Host (16-bit, 400-MHz peer-to-peer XIO link)
- SDRAM (The SDRAM is 32 MB (V6 or V10) or 128 MB (V8 or V12); the memory bus operates at half the speed of the buzz ASIC.)
- PB&J ASIC
All VPro boards support the OpenGL ARB imaging extensions, allowing for hardware acceleration of numerous imaging operations at real-time rates.
[edit] VPro Series
| Option: | Colour: | RAM: | Texture Memory(up to) | Geometry Speed |
| V6 | 48bit RGBA | 32MB | 8MB | Original GE speed |
| V8 | 48bit RGBA | 128MB | 104MB | Original GE speed |
| V10 | 48bit RGBA | 32MB | 8MB | 2X Faster GE speed |
| V12 | 48bit RGBA | 128MB | 104MB | 2X Faster GE speed |
