http://www.austin.ibm.com/software/OpenGL/ (World Wide Web Directory, ~04/1995)

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Welcome!

Welcome to the "OpenGL® at IBM" Home Page! We hope that you can use this page to direct you to all of the different OpenGL-related products and activities, both inside and outside of IBM. Immediately below, you will find a breif overview of some of our 3D graphics products, pointers to technical articles, and some pointers to other graphics-related information.

Product Information

IBM offers OpenGL 1.0 on AIX at several different price and performance points, on most configurations of it's RS/6000 workstation line. Hardware accelerated OpenGL is available through two recently announced products: the mid-range POWER GXT1000 and the high-end Freedom Series 6000. Both platforms provide h/w support for texture mapping, accumulation, stencil and alpha buffers, as well as a h/w accelerated lighting and geometry transformation pipeline. The Freedom Series is based on an architecture developed by Evans and Sutherland.

OpenGL is supported on most other RS/6000 graphics configurations, including the GXT150 family of graphics adapters for the PowerPC-based /6000's as well as on the Gt1 family, the Gt3 family, and the Gt4 family of graphics adapters. This support is provided through SoftGraphics, a highly-tuned, highly-optimized pure software implementation of OpenGL. (Because of the lack of support for an RGB X11 TrueColor visual on the 3D-HP-CGP and GTO adapters, OpenGL is not offered on these machines. This is the only exception to OpenGL support on the RS/6000 line. Sorry). OpenGL requires AIX 3.2.5 or later.

IBM has exhibited a software technology that allows OpenGL to run under OS/2 2.1 at the Fall '93 Comdex and SIGGRAPH '94 trade shows. OpenGL running under OS/2 Warp on Intel and PowerPC platforms was demoed at the Fall '94 Comdex. The interface spcification for OpenGL under OS/2 has been presented to the OpenGL ARB for review. The OpenGL on OS/2 beta is available on the OS/2 Developer Connection CD-ROM, and also by writing to gl-beta@austin.ibm.com (issue 6 of the Developer Connection CD-ROM will include Warp and 24-bit support). OpenGL sample programs for OS/2 are available on CompuServe. Look for OpenGL.zip on the OS2DF2 forum, in the OS/2 Developer magazine section. If your viewer supports forms, you can click here to register for the beta program.

Technical Information

The Programming with OpenGL article in the February 1994 isssue of AIXpert Magazine provides an overview of OpenGL, as well as delving fairly deeply into OpenGL/X11 integration issues. This article also contains a breif discussion of GL to OpenGL portability issues.

The pure-software implementation of OpenGL required a number of difficult design decisions and tradeoffs. These tradeoffs, with a focus towards the PowerPC instruction set, are discussed in the OpenGL Software Architecture article from the RISC System/6000 Technology Book .

The IBM Redbook 3D Computer Graphics Overview provides a simple introduction to some of the basic concepts underlying 3D graphics, including modeling, lighting, rasterization, hardware and performance. A list of other IBM Redbooks, including ordering information, can be found here.

Additional information can be found below.

: The OpenGL WWW Center
: Template Graphics Software Home
: OpenGL on AIX
: RS/6000 Graphics Adapters
: AIX Operating System
: RS/6000 Hardware
: Pex and Phigs
: Ultimedia Services /6000 Video and Audio Services
: OS/2 Warp
: OpenDoc vs. OLE 2.0
: Application Offerings Announcement Letters
: Distributed Systems Announcement Letters
: OpenGL Ordering Information