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SGI announces port of IRIS Performer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fun-with-porting dept.

SGI just announced a Linux porting effort for IRIS Performer. Performer is an OpenGL-based scene graph library optimized for visual simulation; it's used in areas like military and commercial flight simulation, as well as the rides at DisneyQuest. Release is expected before the end of 1999. Performer is designed to drive the fastest graphics hardware and run the most demanding graphics apps in existence, so this is very good news.

1 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why not do Inventor First? by Performer+Guy · · Score: 5

    I am a developer on the Performer team at SGI. IRIS Performer is not built under or over Open Inventor it runs on OpenGL. It cannot be used with Open Inventor within an application although it can load Inventor file formats into the scene graph. To support older SGI systems it can also run on IrisGL by linking to a different set of libraries. Mongoose is just a project code name so Performer on Linux is nicknamed mongoose.

    IRIS Performer and Inventor have quite different design objectives. Performer focuses on maximum Performance and scalability (fast hardware, multiple processors and multiple graphics pipes), Inventor is designed for ease of use and user manipulation of 3D data. Performer also has more of an emphasis on features and file formats required by the simulation and training industries.

    For tutorials on how to program with Performer as well as lots of screen shots & source code of some advanced Performer demos see:

    http://www.dorbie.com/

    This should give you a taste of the kind of graphics empowered by IRIS Performer and how you go about writing code for them using the API.