Jumping in... Well, I would definitely be interested in getting more history background about the original design of the OpenGL API. There was a collaboration between Pixar and SGI in the late 80s, probably around the same time that both IrisGL and the Renderman specification emerged. Pixar had been working on this for some time, yet, I am unsure of how the whole process of OpenGL (IrisGL) happened. Did Pixar propose the Renderman specification to SGI, which then proposed a real-time api inspired on that? Or did SGI develop this all internally and by chance came to some similar design?
Raphael On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 10:42 PM, Paul Martz <[email protected]> wrote: > As the British punk band The Stranglers used to say, "Everybody loves you > when you're dead." > > Sure, SGI did some things pretty well, but let us not forget they also did > some things pretty poorly, and in my opinion were really not much better or > worse than many other hardware vendors. > > Things they did well: OpenGL 1.0 was a masterpiece of design that took the > graphics world by storm and utterly crushed several other competing APIs of > the era. This is an API that is so well-accepted that it has outlived its > creator. > > Things they didn't do well: Too much focus on the high end. Bad business > decisions. No focus on open standards until absolutely forced to do so. Not > able to keep pace with the industry (look where they are now). > > And marketing faux pas... When OpenGL 1.0 first came out, SGI marketing > constantly repeated the notion that immediate mode was the most important > thing in the world. (This was a direct slam against the PHIGS/PEX APIs, > which were focused on retained mode.) At the same time, SGI was promoting > their 1.1 million triangles/second hardware. However, all their demos had a > performance HUD that clearly showed significantly less than 1.1m tris/sec. > When pressed on this, they eventually published a benchmark that > demonstrated 1.1m tris/sec, but it used display lists. Oops. > > Paul Martz > Skew Matrix Software LLC > http://www.skew-matrix.com > +1 303 859 9466 > > _______________________________________________ > osg-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org >
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