The Design of a Parallel Graphics Interface

It has become increasingly difficult to drive a modern highperformance graphics accelerator at full speed with a serial immediate-mode graphics interface. To resolve this problem, retainedmode constructs have been integrated into graphics interfaces. While retained-mode constructs provide a good solution in many cases, at times they provide an undesirable interface model for the application programmer, and in some cases they do not solve the performance problem. In order to resolve some of these cases, we present a parallel graphics interface that may be used in conjunction with the existing API as a new paradigm for highperformance graphics applications. The parallel API extends existing ideas found in OpenGL and X11 that allow multiple graphics contexts to simultaneously draw

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: Homan Igehy, Gordon Stoll, Pat Hanrahan
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Graphics Interface, Immediate-mode Graphics Interface, SIGGRAPH 1998, Undesirable Interface Model