Product Summary
IntelliStation M Pro
The IntelliStation M Pro workstation is optimized to the demands of engineers,
media creators, software developers, and financial analysts. Features include
mission-critical reliability, a user-centric design, task-tuned 2D/3D graphics
based on the IBM Fire GL2 graphics card, and a scalable tower configuration.
This package comes equipped with either Pentium III processors at up to 1GHz
or Pentium 4 processors at up to 1.5GHz, and a choice of either an Intel 840
or 850 chipset. System performance is enhanced by an SCSI controller and disk
and RAMBUS memory. www.ibm.com.
Precision Series
The Dell Precision Series supports high-performance capabilities in digital
content creation, computer-aided design, geographic information systems, software
development, and financial analysis markets. For those who run computationally-intensive
applications, the Precision Series offers the Precision Workstation 330, featuring
a Pentium 4 processor at 1.4 and 1.5GHz, and a 400MHz system bus optimized for
RDRAM and a broad selection of professional graphic solutions. www.dell.com.
Visualize X-Class
Hewlett Packard's Visualize X-Class is designed for users performing simulations,
virtual prototyping, complex modeling, and other high-end visualization tasks.
This package includes single or dual Intel Pentium III processors with 256KB
of high speed transfer cache, two clock frequencies to choose from (866 MHz
and 1GHz), and greater mass storage expandability (up to 72GB internal disk)
for the disk space and performance needed to work on large models and multiple
designs. The X-Class features interactive model lighting and rotation and is
able to allocate very large amounts of memory for texture mapping. www.hp.com.
Power Mac G4
The PowerPC G4's Velocity Engine is able to process data in 128-bit chunks
instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors.
In addition, the PowerPC G4 can perform four (in some cases eight) 32-bit floating-point
calculations in a single cycle—two to four times faster than traditional
processors.
Features include a vector permute function capable of rearranging data in the
registers, of particular benefit when converting data from one format to another
and a pre-installed graphics card capable of transferring digital video data
at up to four times the speed of the original AGP bus. www.apple.com.
Quadro2 Pro
This full-featured board provides advanced 3D and 2D performance. Features
include a hardware antialiased line engine, a 6.4GB/sec bandwidth that enables
work in fully textured mode while achieving real-time frame rates, and a 64MB
unified frame buffer that supports high-resolution, 32bpp textures. With 1.0G
pixels/sec and 31M triangles/sec geometry processing capabilities, the Quadro2
Pro can support just about any engineering design environment. The Shading Rasterizer
feature makes realistic material properties possible through per-pixel shading
effects. www.nvidia.com
Octane2
The Silicon Graphics Octane2 multimedia workstation is capable of interactive
rendering of three-dimensional or volumetric data sets, featuring high-performance
VPro Graphics and 128MB of configurable graphics memory. The combination supports
faster drawing, display, and manipulation of large data sets—up to 1920x1200
pixels at 60Hz. Designed for high performance with big data, the Octane2 delivers
a measured 448 million pixels per second with trilinear mipmapping and depth-buffering,
and 18 million lit depth-buffered, smooth-shaded immediate mode triangles per
second.
The 12-bit per color component path achieves more levels of color to allow
users to see subtle variations—extremely important in medical imaging and
other fields of science and research. www.sgi.com.
Graphire
Inexpensive and easy to use, the Wacom Graphire graphics tablet measures just
over eight inches square, with an active area of 4" x 5". The tablet
connects via cable to a computer with a USB or serial port, and features a transparent
overlay for easy tracing. Graphire comes with a programmable pen featuring a
built-in eraser and 512 levels of pressure sensitivity to enable users to draw
a sketch, add a note to an e-mail, or sign their name. Also included in the
package is a cordless, batteryless Graphire Mouse, which has 1,015 lines per
inch of resolution. The mouse has no ball to clog up, includes three programmable
buttons and a scrolling wheel, and is designed for ambidextrous use. Graphire
ships bundled with six applications including Adobe Photoshop LE, Corel Painter
Classic, Sensiva, and Adobe ActiveShare. www.wacom.com
MyFonts.com
Need a font? MyFonts.com is an online source for purchasing fonts from many
well-known foundries. MyFonts.com offers more than 11,000 fonts, most available
in TrueType and PostScript Type 1 formats for both Windows and Macintosh. Several
useful features make it easy to buy fonts, even for customers who aren't sure
what they want. MyFonts Valet allows customers to enter keywords to browse and
locate fonts using descriptive terms, font names, or the name of a particular
foundry or designer. The Test Drive feature allows users to enter sample text
and display it in a variety of sizes before purchase, and WhatTheFont allows
users to scan a sample of text and upload it to the Web site where the closest
matches are then displayed. www.myfonts.com
formZ
A general-purpose solid and surface modeler, formZ is a design tool with an
extensive set of 2D/3D form manipulating and sculpting capabilities. The interactive
graphic interface with associated multiple windows, tear off tool palettes,
undo/redo operations, customizable key shortcuts, simultaneously available prepick
and postpick modes, and integrated 2D/3D operations allows users to work in
either 2D or directly in 3D space.
2D and 3D geometric transformations provide the ability to move, rotate, scale,
or reflect either individual entities or groups of entities simultaneously.
Users can attach, extend, and place tools to facilitate the positioning of objects
or their parts relative to other objects, and a Query tool provides the ability
to determine information about objects, as well as calculate areas, volumes,
and distances.
An integrated drafting module allows images to be transported from modeling
to drafting and vice versa, and offers associative dimensioning and hatching,
2D Boolean operations, text, and symbols. www.formz.com
Painter 6
Corel Painter 6 is a painting tool particularly useful for graphic designers
and artists. Users can choose from hundreds of brushes and art materials, and
the new brush engine not only renders continuous single-pixel lines of color
(representing individual brush hairs), but also makes the process much faster
than in previous versions. The updated interface allows users to tailor collapsible
palettes and control the amount of onscreen information, and access as many
palettes as needed within an organized workspace. A variety of features allow
users to apply different colors of paint to each “bristle" of the brush;
paint in 3D layers; insert, edit, tilt, rotate, stretch, scale, and type works
directly on a curve using automatic configurable drop shadows; and open and
save CMYK TIFF images. www.corel.com
N'esys
Earth scientists, chemists, biologists, medical researchers, engineers, and
other professionals use N'esys software from Research Systems for analyzing,
visualizing, and maintaining control of data. All versions of the program generate
2D and 3D visualizations and allow varying plotting formats as well. Compatible
with both Macintosh and Windows platforms, N'esys eliminates the need for expensive,
high-end workstations. Features include an easy-to-use graphical interface and
visualization applications Transform, T3D, and Plot. N'esys also provides raster
imaging of data, global map projections, importing of many file types, and the
ability to create, edit, and organize data using the HDF (Hierarchical Data
Format) file format. www.researchsystems.com
ACDSee
ACDSee enables users to organize and quickly browse through folders and view
thumbnail images of files. Supporting more than 40 image formats, the ACDSee
Browser is designed for fast display of images and archive file contents. High-speed
access lets users click on a filename and get an immediate display inside the
Preview window. The Folder Tree feature provides a view of all the folders on
the system for easy access to images, and clicking on any folder opens it instantly.
Other features include image sharing and photo enhancement capabilities, simplified
file conversion, drag-and-drop functions, a user-friendly graphical interface,
and a customizable toolbar. Audio and video clips are easily played from the
browser, and users can acquire images from clip art, CDs, or the Internet, as
well as with the aid of a scanner or a digital camera. www.acdsystems.com
Studio Artist
Synthetik's Studio Artist graphics synthesizer is an intelligent-assisted painting,
drawing, video, and image-processing software. Studio Artist is able to look
at an image and automatically and/or interactively paint or draw it in a choice
of styles, including 3D Paint. Studio Artist is resolution independent—able
to take a low-resolution image and re-render it at a higher resolution with
its hybrid model of raster paint and editable vectors paths. The Auto-Rotoscoping
and Visual Effects features turn low-resolution Quicktime movies into high-resolution
moving art. Studio Artist also features morphing and interactive warping features, animation, layers, and a complete image-processing suite. Studio Artist ships with more than 1,000 fully editable graphics tools and allows users to create their own tools as well, using the paint synthesizer or paint evolution feature. www.synthetik.com
