RealityEngine

Geometry Engine board.

Raster Manager board.

RealityEngine refers to a 3D graphics hardware architecture and a family of graphics systems that implemented the aforementioned hardware architecture that was developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics during the early to mid 1990s. The RealityEngine was positioned as Silicon Graphics's high-end visualization hardware for their MIPS/IRIX platform and was used exclusively in their Crimson and Onyx family of visualization systems, which are sometimes referred to as "graphics supercomputers" or "visualization supercomputers". The RealityEngine was marketed to and used by large organizations such as companies and universities that are involved in computer simulation, digital content creation, engineering and research.

It was succeeded by the InfiniteReality in early 1996, but coexisted with it for a time as an entry-level option for older systems.

RealityEngine

The RealityEngine was a board set comprising a Geometry Engine board, one to four Raster Manager board(s), and a DG2 Display Generator board. These boards plugged into a midplane on the host system.

The Geometry Engine was based around the 50 MHz Intel i860XP.

VTX

The VTX was a cost-reduced RealityEngine and as a consequence, its features and performance was below that of the RealityEngine. It is not the VGX or VGXT board set.

RealityEngine²

The RealityEngine2, branded RealityEngine², is an upgraded RealityEngine with twelve instead of eight Geometry Engines introduced towards the end of the RealityEngine's life. It was succeeded by the InfiniteReality in early 1996.

It uses the GE10 Geometry Engine board, RM4 Raster Manager board and DG2 Display Generator board.

References

Akeley, Kurt. "RealityEngine Graphics". Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '93, pp. 109-116.

Silicon Graphics

Company	Silicon Graphics (1981–2009) Silicon Graphics International (since 2009)

People	James H. Clark Kurt Akeley David J. Brown Herb Kuta Abbey Silverstone Bob Lutz Rick Belluzzo Paul Haeberli

Motorola 68000 computers	SGI IRIS

MIPS computers	IRIS 4D Indigo Indigo² Indy Crimson O2 Octane Challenge Origin 200 Origin 2000 Onyx2 Origin and Onyx 3000

Intel-based computers	Visual Workstation Altix Prism

Graphics hardware	Geometry Engine Elan Impact VPro RealityEngine InfiniteReality

Other technology	IRIX Image format MEX Workspace 4Sight Interactive Desktop Xsgi 4Dwm XFS IRIS GL OpenGL GIO XIO NUMAlink IndyCam

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, February 05, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.