New support for OpenGL:
VGX, Personal IRIS, 64-bit, and FORTRAN

******************************************************************************
                        CUSTOMER SERVICES ENGINEERING
                          FOR YOUR INFORMATION ONLY!
******************************************************************************

Title: New support for OpenGL:  VGX, Personal IRIS, 64-bit, and FORTRAN

Information Provided By: Mason Woo

Date: 9/19/1994

Document ID: FYI1994110


=============================================================================
By popular demand, starting with IRIX 5.3, an OpenGL graphics
library will be provided for workstations with VGX graphics
options (including VGXT and Skywriter) and Personal IRIS
workstations (8-bit, G, and TG graphics options).

IRIX 6.0 will have a full 64-bit OpenGL, as well as a 32-bit
OpenGL library, for compatibility for older executables.
Also, for the first time, FORTRAN bindings will also be available,
for both IRIX 5.3 and IRIX 6.0.

For the VGX and Personal IRIS implementation, the goal is
to provide a platform for writing OpenGL applications on those
machines.  To accelerate functionality for these machines, these OpenGL
libraries are built atop the IRIS GL wherever possible.  Some
functions will make rendering a little slower or
somewhat noticeably slower than IRIS GL (80-100% of IRIS GL
speed).  In a number of states, rendering is totally
unaccelerated; that is, it is done in software (the CPU), and
rendering performance is at a small fraction of IRIS GL speed.
For adequate interactive performance, you should avoid software
execution states.


The most noticeable unaccelerated state is texture mapping.
Rendering a textured image will be done in software, at less than
10% of IRIS GL speed for VGX graphics hardware.  (A Reality Engine
upgrade will provide native, hardware support for texture mapping
for OpenGL.)

If your customer wants to use their existing hardware to write
code for portability to other platforms and/or maximum
performance on our future product line, then OpenGL for the VGX
and Personal IRIS will extend the usefulness of those products as
application development systems.  If your customer expects to get
our quoted benchmark numbers, then by all means, please continue
to use IRIS GL.  For maximum performance, the best solution will
be to use IRIS GL in mixed model mode, preparing to port to
OpenGL on other SGI hardware.  If software rendering states can
be avoided, then writing OpenGL code today should provide
reasonable graphics performance.

Notice that 5.3 is not expected to MR until mid November
and customer shipments (in volume) will start in early 1995.