Creativity and insight are limited by our understanding of today's reality and our ability to create tomorrow's. InfiniteReality4 graphics gives you the visual realism, advanced features, and performance needed to see things as they are and how they could be. Whether you are designing the next-generation sports car, uncovering new petroleum reserves, or creating the next blockbuster movie, InfiniteReality4 graphics lets you and your team go beyond the limitations of computer graphics and unleash the power of advanced visualization.

A Breakthrough in Visual Realism

Making the leap from imagined to real requires more than polygons and pixels per second; it demands an integrated approach to graphics hardware, software, and system design that is only available with InfiniteReality4 and SGI® Onyx® family visualization supercomputers. Stunning realism is only achieved when hardware and software are designed together and work in concert to render compelling imagery and maintain the physical truthfulness behind it. Techniques such as image-based rendering, dynamic shaders, and interactive volume rendering are possible because SGI® APIs are designed to exploit the advanced features of SGI Onyx family systems with InfiniteReality4 graphics.

Industrial Strength

InfiniteReality4 enables competitive breakthroughs in every industry where users have to work with unpredictable environments. InfiniteReality4 delivers photo-realistic scenes of any data, from any perspective, not just along predetermined paths.

• Energy: Individual seismic analysts or asset teams can be many times more productive because InfiniteReality4 gives them 1Gbyte of texture memory, and interactive volume visualization and scalable displays allow them to optimize decisions across entire fields.
• Government: More effective simulation and training for military and homeland security is enabled through increased model complexity, image-based rendering, and full-scene 8 subsample anti-aliasing.
• Manufacturing: Companies achieve shorter time to market with better products because designers can create more accurate depictions of future products using advanced shader and image-based rendering techniques and display them in high resolution, life-size environments.
• Sciences: Researchers deliver differentiated results in chemistry and pharmaceutical research, medicine, physics, and engineering through the study of more complex phenomena and the development of higher-quality virtual environments.
• Media: Higher impact on-air HD and SD graphics, more creative and realistic virtual sets, and higher-performance editing and compositing solutions can be achieved using 48-bit RGBA color and real-time color space conversion.

No Bottlenecks or Limitations

Our eyes see over 9 million pixels of information, so why be content with computer graphics that display 1 or 2 million pixels? Each InfiniteReality4 graphics pipe can display over 8 million pixels of visual information using up to eight separate display channels to fully immerse a user or team in the data. Furthermore, the design of SGI Onyx family systems provides the computational power, I/O, and graphics bandwidth to support up to 8 InfiniteReality4 graphics pipes on a single system, so a small team or a large audience can experience photo-realistic visualizations with up to 65 million pixels of display. There are no bottlenecks or limitations, since high-resolution data can stream from disk, be processed, and be displayed in real -time--and the advanced real-time design of IRIX® means that time-critical response in guaranteed.

Universal Access to Advanced Visualization

Visual Area Networking enables anyone with a networked computing device to access the power of an SGI Onyx family system. Interactive applications that take advantage of advanced graphics, computing, and I/O power are now available to SGI, Sun™, Linux®, and Windows® OS-based desktops and mobile computing devices without any modifications to underlying software. Visual Area Networking is the perfect complement to InfiniteReality4 graphics, since it enables technical and creative professionals to quickly understand and solve large problems that require advanced visualization capabilities and allows creative professionals to take their most powerful tool with them wherever they go.

High-Performance APIs Make the Development of Differentiated Software Applications a Snap

SGI has a complete portfolio of advanced visualization software optimized to work with InfiniteReality4 graphics. Whether you are developing software for flight simulation, seismic analysis, photo-realistic design review, or the latest in film editing and special effects, SGI has software designed just for you. It doesn't matter if you are starting from scratch or adding new features into existing code, software developed by SGI makes it easy to differentiate your solution from the crowd. And, when combined with Visual Area Networking, it allows you to deliver the results direct to any desktop or mobile computing device.

Binary Compatibility Ensures Immediate Impact

InfiniteReality4 graphics maintains binary compatibility with previous generations of InfiniteReality family graphics so your existing advanced visualization applications run faster and better than ever before. Furthermore, SGI protects your existing investment in advanced visualization systems by making it easy and affordable to upgrade InfiniteReality family graphics in your existing SGI Onyx 3000 series, SGI® Onyx® 350 and Silicon Graphics® Onyx2® systems without changing the underlying system hardware or applications software.

InfiniteReality4 features include: