Visualization System

The Sun Fire V880z visualization system is a workgroup system powered by Solaris and the new Sun XVR-4000 graphics accelerator. The new system combines 3D graphics features with a Solaris-based Sun Fire V880 server. The system is designed to power high-end 3D applications. It is able to handle more than 60 million fully lit, textured, anti-aliased triangles per second. The graphics interconnect bandwidth is greater than 2 GB per second utilizing Sun’s Fire Plane Interconnect. This allows processing of very complex data-sets, while delivering interactive frame rates. The architecture features four dedicated filter chips, which process the sample data stored in the frame buffer memory, to implement the anti-aliasing, resulting in the elimination of jaggies from 3D objects. Each pixel in the frame buffer is represented by up to 16 subpixel samples, randomly located. Each filter chip implements a 5 pixel x 5 pixel programmable radial filter, coupled with 16-way stochastic sampling, resulting in much higher quality images in comparison to typical one-box filters.