IRIS performer: a high performance multiprocessing toolkit for real-time 3D graphics

This paper describes the design and implementation of IRIS Performer, a toolkit for visual simulation, virtual reality, and other real-time 3D graphics applications. The principal design goal is to allow application developers to more easily obtain maximal performance from 3D graphics workstations which feature multiple CPUs and support an immediate-mode rendering library. To this end, the toolkit combines a low-level library for high-performance rendering with a high-level library that implements pipelined, parallel traversals of a hierarchical scene graph. While discussing the toolkit architecture, the paper illuminates and addresses performance issues fundamental to immediate-mode graphics and coarse-grained, pipelined multiprocessing. Graphics optimizations focus on efficient data transfer to the graphics subsystem, reduction of mode settings, and restricting state inheritance. The toolkit's multiprocessing features solve the problems of how to partition work among multiple p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: John Rohlf, James Helman
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Graphics, Real-time 3D Graphics, SIGGRAPH 1994, Toolkit's Multiprocessing Features