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Beta for IRIS Performer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the if-you-want-cool-graphics dept.

A couple months ago, SGI announced that they would be porting IRIS Performer to Linux. Thanks to Allan Schaffer for pointing us over to the first beta version that's ready for the public.

7 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:man..does it suck. by Allan_Schaffer · · Score: 3

    Allright, our first 'it sucks', surprised it took so long. Apparently you overlooked the list of known bugs. Mouse/keybd input is not tuned for linux yet, so such input suffers from very high latency. This is something that will be fixed in the next Beta.

  2. Let's finish the product for a change by heroine · · Score: 3

    Notice how companies like SGI, Real, and Microsoft give out betas of their software to test the Linux waters but never release a final version. The problem with using betas to test the waters is that no-one wants to download a beta when they're expecting a final version to come out later. The company sees no interest and either drops the project after the first beta or renames the beta as the final version and then drops it. It happened with RealPlayer, Netshow, and IE4.

  3. Re:RED FUCKING LINUX by Allan_Schaffer · · Score: 3

    Not that you act like the kind of customer
    we'd like to have, but...

    If you look at our download page you'll see
    that we ship both .rpm files (intended for
    Red Hat 6.0, which is what we use) and also
    plain old '.tgz' (gzip'd tar) files for Linuxes
    which don't support rpm's. Sounds like the
    best support for all worlds to me.

  4. Not available for Linux by Dr.+Tom · · Score: 3

    Is it just me, or do other people find it highly annoying that something released for "Linux" is only available for x86 systems? "Linux" is not a hardware specific term. In my opinion, if you say it "runs under Linux" then it should be 1) source code (which SGI's thing is not) or 2) available for ALL architectures that Linux supports (e.g. Alpha, PPC, etc.).

  5. Exxxxcellent by Pilchie · · Score: 3

    A year or so ago I had a chance to work with Performer on an SGI Onyx II, while working on a simulator for a co-op placement. It is a really nice class library, and simplifies OpenGL to a level where even a novice can write (good) code for it. I am really happy to hear that it is moving out to Linux. That should make Linux boxes even more possible as simulation engines. Anyway good news! (First?)
    >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    --
    >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Pilchie
  6. Re:suitability for games by Pascal+Q.+Porcupine · · Score: 3
    Performer is a high-level interface on top of OpenGL. It's like the difference between using the C++ STL vector template and hand-realloc()ing your data as needed. It has its own set of problems and frustrations and its own additional bunch of overhead, but in general it's easier to get something working decently and almost as fast as rolling it yourself.

    Performer would, in fact, be great for a game engine; in fact, it's used for realtime military simulations all the time, and that's about as close to a game as you can get in the SGI-based professional graphics world. :)
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

    --
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
    Quine "quine?
  7. Re:Great, but how well does it run? by Allan_Schaffer · · Score: 5

    We've found performance to be very reasonable. Of course on SGI systems it screams :-) .. On systems without linux-ready hardware accelerated OpenGL, Mesa is used as the low-level OpenGL-like rendering layer. The Performer Town database (the most typical Performer demo) runs untextured at about 5-10Hz depending on the CPU. On systems with Linux-based hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers we see 20-30Hz in the town, WITH texture. This is a BETA version also, it's not even compiled optimized or fully tuned, so we expect to see some pretty excellent performance by the time the final release is ready.