A technical overview of OpenGL Performer™ 3.1 (PDF 1.0M)

IRIS Performer™ 2.2: Rendering for High-Performance and Interactive Graphics Applications
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A technical overview of IRIS Performer 2.2.

Using Dplex and Hyperpipes
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The Digital Video Multiplexer (DPLEX) is an optional daughtercard that permits multiple InfiniteReality2 or InfiniteReality™ pipelines in an Onyx2® system to work simultaneously on a single visual application. DPLEX provides this capability in hardware, which results in nearly perfect scaling of both geometry rate and fill rate on some applications.

Using Clip Textures
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OpenGL Performer on InfiniteReality allows you to create textures that are much larger than will fit in texture memory or even in system memory, so that you can fit the entire world in a single texture. OpenGL Performer manages all of the texture loading from disk to system memory and then to texture memory, based on your current position in the database. Efficient management of texture memory is made possible by special capabilities of the InfiniteReality texturing hardware. This general technique is called clipmapping and is the subject of this paper.

Optimization for Real-Time Graphics Applications
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Real-time entertainment applications are very sensitive to image quality, performance, and system cost. Graphics workstations provide full product lines with a full range of price points and performance options. At the high end, they provide many Image Generator features such as real-time texture mapping and full scene anti-aliasing. They can also support many channels, or players, per workstation to offset the cost of getting the high-end features. At the low end, they have entry prices and performance that are often competitive with PCs. Graphics workstations can provide a very powerful, flexible solution with a rich development environment. Additionally, because of binary compatibility across product lines and standards in graphics APIs, graphics workstations offer the possibility of portability of both applications and databases to different and future architectures. However, this power and flexibility increase the complexity for achieving the full quoted performance on such a machine. This paper presents a strategy for performance for developing and tuning real-time graphics applications on graphics workstations.

Witches' Brew
The following is a collection of technical demonstrations designed to explain some advanced techniques that you can use in your OpenGL Performer™ application. These techniques address some standard tasks and problems for visual simulation applications. Full solutions to these and other problems are the focus of entire products available from our partners. See the following Web pages for partner information.

	Aqua [PDF (1.0M) | HTML] This aquatic demonstration shows how to implement many features commonly required by 3D applications and a few less-common rendering tricks.
	Billboard [PDF (259K) | HTML] This shows how an OpenGL Performer application might optimize the processing overhead of drawing many billboarded trees.
	Thermal [PDF (546K) | HTML] Sensor simulation is possible using OpenGL Performer and OpenGL®; texture lookup tables, noise effects, automatic gain control, and convolution are demonstrated here.
	UAV [PDF (893K) | HTML] UAV shows an unusual use of projective texturing and shadow testing for accelerated image orthorectification.
	EnvMap [PDF (182K) | HTML] Environment mapping in real time usually uses a fixed environment map; this code shows how to map the actual database environment reflected by a nonplanar object.
	Anisotropic [PDF (312K) | HTML] Mip-map filters tend to trade image information for anti-aliasing due to the isotropic filter; this demo shows how to improve texturing to avoid losing information.
	Bump Logo [PDF (801K) | HTML] This demonstration shows a few reflection, light map, and bump mapping tricks that can greatly enhance the quality of a rendered scene.
	OceanBump [PDF (137K) | HTML] OceanBump shows how to approximate bump mapping on a shiny surface such as the ocean.
	OceanEnv [PDF (197K) | HTML] Phong illumination models are actually a poor way to represent water surfaces; this example shows how Fresnel-based approximations can be combined with view-independent environment mapping and obtain more realistic results.
	Volume [PDF ( 90K) | HTML] By implementing some simple volume rendering this example shows the use of 3D texture and glClipPlane.