Re: 98' NT SGI Intel workstations ...

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David Blythe (blythe++at++banshee)
Tue, 16 Dec 1997 22:09:08 -0800

| Angus wrote:
| >
| > No, Performer as you currently know it will not be available on NT.
| >
| > OpenGL++ is under development and will offer a cross platform MP
| > scene graph based graphics API.
| >
| > Cheers,Angus.
|
| My question is: Will (or how well will) OpenGL++ handle multi-pipe
| rendering? I liked Inventor, but ridiculous work-arounds were
| required to do multi-pipe rendering because of how things were
| handled internally -- something that was never fixed.
|
| I fear the same will happen with OpenGL++, making it entirely
| useless for my purposes, and I suspect a lot of other people too.
| A recent conversation I had with someone on the OGL++ team didn't
| help to allay my fears either. I was told that there were a lot
| of things desireable for inclusion in OGL++ that might not make
| it into the first release. The fear is that if the entire framework
| of OGL++ is based around a flawed scheme (as with Inventor), then
| it will remain flawed throughout it's lifetime (as with Inventor).
| And then I'll be in the position of hoping that a product that
| I was initially excited about will die a quick death so that
| something better will come along and replace it (as with Inventor).

Since the people working on OpenGL++ include people working on Performer
and Inventor, it seems reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt
when it comes to understanding the capabilities of Performer and Inventor.
The point of having an alpha process with an early release is to fix flawed
architectural aspects early, not entrench a bad design. To answer your
question, multi-pipe rendering is an important feature and that includes
handling pipe & channel specific state.
        -db

|
| The problem with Inventor was that the scene-graph database was
| used by the renderer to store state information about the rendering
| process -- a major problem when more than one process is rendering
| from the same scene-graph at the same time, out of shared memory.
|
| Bill
|
| BTW Angus, the header of your mail just has:
|
| From: dorbie++at++multipass
|
| which won't help people not emailing from SGI. Apparently something
| happened to your sendmail config between November 25 and December 8.
|
| /*************************************************************************/
| /* Bill Sherman (wsherman++at++ncsa.uiuc.edu) */
| /* National Center for Supercomputing Applications */
| /* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign */
| /* Og - "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes" */
| /* Spinner - "but facts don't always reveal the truth" */
| /* Robin - "Yeah, but I always figure that's the writers' fault" */
| /*************************************************************************/
|
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