UltimateVision

UltimateVision was the final high-end graphics architecture that was SGI branded, with ATi (now AMD) providing the chipsets for the Onyx4 and Prism workstations.

Information

Introduced in 2006, UltimateVision was offered as the graphics option for SGI’s Prism and Onyx4 visualization systems,. The UltimateVision subsystem was designed to scale from a single high-performance graphics pipe to multi-pipe configurations for visualization walls, immersive VR caves, and advanced scientific rendering workloads.

UltimateVision succeeded the long-running InfiniteReality line that had powered SGI’s Onyx workstations and servers. While InfiniteReality was based on custom ASICs, UltimateVision relied more heavily on off-the-shelf graphics components integrated into SGI’s system architecture. This shift reflected SGI’s financial decline and the growing dominance of commodity GPUs from vendors such as NVIDIA and ATI.

Implications for IRIX

The UltimateVision for the Onyx4 is an ATi FireGL X1 graphics card on a customized AGP backplane. It required using Xfree86 instead of XSGI, which means IRISGL-based demos no longer will work.