Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!iear.arts.rpi.edu!kyriazis
From: kyriazis@iear.arts.rpi.edu (George Kyriazis)
Subject: Re: Will PEX become popular? (In English)
Message-ID: <{=~#!%$@rpi.edu>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
References: <4914c3a0.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 9 Mar 90 18:17:35 GMT
Lines: 38

In article <4914c3a0.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> jch@apollo.HP.COM (Jan Hardenbergh) writes:
>This is an excellent point. Special purpose graphics engines are not 
>appropriate for all graphics applications. Look at a DN10K sometime.
>It has a very smart frame buffer for a graphics engine. All of the
>geometry pipeline is done by the regular CPU, or CPUs. It can give you
>78K polygons per second, but you have all of that power to run your
>application when you are not doing graphics. (Err... that 78k is GMR3D)
>
I will certainly look into the architecture if the DN10K.

>You seem to equate PHIGS with graphics engine. No reason to do that.
>
So, PHIGS runs on machines with graphics accelerators and machine
without graphics accelerators.  There is more to talk about when dealing
with machines that have accelerators.  For low cost machines, there is
no real hardware problem; you just srtuggle to make the software run
with the existing hardware.  For more expensive machines though there
is the challange of how to design the custom additional hardware.

>You also seem to think PHIGS will be replaced while still acknowledging
>it has the right tools. I think you will do better to get better access
>to the tools that PHIGS has instead of starting the standards process over.
>
Ok.  Perhaps replaced wasn't the right word.  There are many things in PHIGS
that are worthwile, and many people have spent a lot of time developing
algorithms to speed it up (you, working at HP can probably be one of them).
By replacing, I meant the same kind of procedure when PHIGS became a 
standard that kinda 'replaced' GKS.  Ok, then.  I think that the 'evolving'
new standard should deviate a bit from the tree structure and allow
DAG structures to be displayed.  

>-Jan Hardenbergh - jch@apollo.hp.com - HP / Graphics Technology Division


----------------------------------------------------------------------
  George Kyriazis                 kyriazis@turing.cs.rpi.edu
				  kyriazis@rdrc.rpi.edu
 				  kyriazis@iear.arts.rpi.edu
