Onyx2 Home Product Overview System Hardware Technical Info Onyx2 Developers Demos			Industry-Standard Power Tools for Developers Great hardware is only part of the solution. Silicon Graphics provides a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) to help you achieve the best performance with your hardware investment. The Onyx2TM APIs were built on OpenGL®, the industry standard for graphics application development, pioneered by Silicon Graphics. Its APIs package OpenGL algorithms as higher-level calls, which are employed by programmers to shorten development time and reduce the lines of code to maintain. OpenGL: The Industry's Foundation for High-Performance Graphics Application programmers access Onyx2 graphics through the industry-standard OpenGL environment to develop 2D and 3D graphics applications. The OpenGL API helps developers quickly and easily create advanced, portable graphics applications. OpenGL fosters innovation by providing low-level access to the advanced rendering capabilities of Onyx2. Building with OpenGL OptimizerTM The award-winning OpenGL Optimizer development environment is a multiplatform toolkit providing higher-level constructs for interacting with extremely large geometric databases. Applications in computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, computer-aided engineering, digital prototyping, and architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) will achieve optimal graphics performance. The OpenGL Optimizer toolkit includes multiprocessing, occlusion culling, topological synthesis, and full support for all complex higher-order trimmed parametric curves and surfaces. These capabilities enable applications that provide efficient rendering performance while maintaining the underlying properties of the model. OpenGL Optimizer combined with Onyx2 revolutionizes complex surface evaluation with RealityMappingTM. Real-Time 3D Rendering with IRIS PerformerTM for High-Performance Interactive Graphics IRIS Performer is the renowned 3D rendering toolkit for developers of real-time, multiprocessed, interactive graphics applications. IRIS Performer dramatically simplifies your development of complex applications in visual simulation, simulation-based design, virtual reality, interactive entertainment, broadcast video, and architectural walk-through. Your application can make automatic and optimal use of all available system features, including peak performance rendering, multiple CPUs, multiple graphics subsystems, filesystem and disk access, and real-time scheduling features. IRIS Performer provides efficient access to Onyx2 capabilities by automatically managing multiple levels of detail, paging of huge textures, and dynamic animated geometry. Volume Imaging with OpenGL Volumizer Our new volume-imaging API is a library of C++ classes that facilitate visualization of voxel-based data sets common in geoscience, medical, and scientific and engineering applications such as computation fluid dynamics and finite element analysis, as well as those implementing physics-based models for special effects such as smoke, fog, and liquid. Developers can more easily create applications to display and manipulate volumetric data (with geometric data if desired). Its use of tetrahedral primitives is an innovative and powerful approach to volume imaging. Powerful ImageVision Library® AE Tools For manipulating, processing, and displaying images, Silicon Graphics offers ImageVision Library. ImageVision Library tools compose a powerful development environment that provides more than 70 robust image operators to use multiple processors and unequaled hardware graphics acceleration. ImageVision Library includes great debugging tools, functions for color conversion, geometric transformation, filtering, edge detection, and graphics subsystem statistics, along with robust caching and data management functions. Cellular IRIXTM Onyx2 systems use the state-of-the-art, 64-bit Cellular IRIX operating system from Silicon Graphics. Cellular IRIX is based on industry-standard UNIX® System V, Release 4 technology. Innovative software technology maintains a familiar, shared-memory programming environment and provides backward compatibility with existing applications, while new capabilities support extensive scalability, high-availability features, and XFSTM. REACTTM Real-Time Performance The REACT extensions for Cellular IRIX deliver deterministic performance capabilities for real-time applications. REACT tools give users control over system overhead, process priority, and processor allocation and scheduling; real-time disk access; and synchronization to external events. Defining the Future of Graphics with Fahrenheit Silicon Graphics and Microsoft Corporation have formed a strategic alliance aimed at increasing the capabilities of visualization applications for a wide variety of customers. One goal is to develop ways to harness the power of Silicon Graphics® API technology in the Windows NT® environment. Toward that end, the companies are collaborating on a project code-named Fahrenheit to provide a common set of low-level and high-level APIs that integrate Silicon Graphics and Microsoft concepts for visualization and graphics for future versions of DirectX for Silicon Graphics and Windows® platforms. Until these technologies are delivered, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft are working together to support the development of graphics applications for professionals through the OpenGL API.

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