[lug] in search of 3D api

[Scott A. Herod]

Archer Sully wrote:
> 
> "Scott A. Herod" wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > People I know would thump me for saying so, but
> > I still like SGI's Performer.  It's perhaps bigger
> > than what you want, but it's not bad to learn
> > if you know OpenGL.
> >
> > http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/apis/performer.html
> >
> >
> 
> Performer is a good API, but it is really optimized for
> high performance VisSim apps.  Considering what I recall
> of the internals of Performer, I have doubts that it
> could run on Linux.  Open Inventor might be a better
> choice, but I don't know how much development is going
> on with it right now.  I've done some programming with
> it and found it tolerable, except for the fact that it
> uses reference counting (boo, hiss!).
> 
> <http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/apis/inventor.html>
> 
> -- archer

Hi,

I had forgotten inventor.  Good call.  ( And I also
think that a good implementation of reference counting is
useful. :-) 

Performer has been on linux for about two years.  I only looked
at it when it first came out in beta and it had plenty of problems
then, including rendering problems and the fact that only one
event was processed per frame.  Frame timing was also not consistant
because of timing issues with the kernel.

In August, I saw SGI's current version and they have made significant
improvements.  They were running the town demo at 60 hz on one of their
550s ( or were they still 540s at the time ).  I am pretty sure that
they made kernel mods to get realtime off the system but don't know
if that work is available.

Scott