Allan Schaffer (aschaffe)
Thu, 7 Oct 1993 18:30:08 -0700
Ah -- these are questions that will be answered in an
excellent manner in the much-promised-but-still-unfinished
Performer FAQ.
But, no reason to keep you waiting for a part that's
already written, so here's a tidbit.
Allan
-2- What is IRIS Performer?
IRIS Performer is a software development environment that supports
programmers implementing high performance graphics applications on
Silicon Graphics products. It offers both high level facilities for
visual simulation and virtual reality tasks and an application-neutral
high-performance hardware-oriented graphics toolkit.
The outer application specific layer of IRIS Performer implements the
tasks needed by visual simulation applications: it performs culling
so that only potentially visable geometry is sent to the graphics
hardware; it controls multiple display channels; it provides fast
intersection tests with simulation databases; and most importantly,
it orchestrates all of this in parallel with rendering on multiple
processor IRIS systems.
The lower-level rendering portion of IRIS Performer is designed for
maximum performance: it's efficient data structures reflect the
details of CPU, cache, and memory system architectures; it's tuned
rendering loops convert the system CPU into an optimized data
movement engine; and it's optimized state management system optimizes
hardware utilization.
IRIS Performer provides a high-performance portability path across
the Silicon Graphics product line. The low level library is
implemented as a hardware-specific shared library, so applications
based on IRIS Performer can achieve peak performance on graphics
systems from Elan to RealityEngine2 without changes or
recompilation.
The product includes a programmer's guide and printed man pages, as
well as on-line man pages, test and demonstration programs, and
complete real-time visual simulation applications. These applications
are provided in source form as an examples of how to build real-time
simulation systems using IRIS Performer. Also included are several
databases in FLIGHT and Wavefront "OBJ" format and source code for
database readers that can load them.
-- Allan Schaffer Silicon Graphics aschaffe++at++sgi.com
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