Re: [Closed REQ 5990]: Query about software compatibility

[daemon]

> We need to know whether the existing versions of Geomeview are
> compatible with the (any?) following graphics accelerators for SUN
> workstations: TurboGX (8-bit), S24 (24 bit), creator and creator3D.

Here's what we know.  There are two possible graphics drivers in Geomview
for the Sun in the next release: the pure-software X renderer,
and the Open GL renderer.

The software X renderer won't take advantage of any graphics accelerators.
If Sun's X server on the S24 offers a 24-bit TrueColor X visual (which it
almost certainly does), then you will get full color from it, but no
acceleration.  (On a Sparcstation 5, the software renderer gets about 6
frames per second for a scene with a couple of thousand polygons.)

To use the Open GL renderer, you'd need to have Open GL libraries from
somewhere.  Sun is now offering Open GL libs which do take advantage of
their creator3D graphics accelerator on UltraSparcs, though not for
any other hardware.  On the one creator3D benchmark I saw, geomview ran
at a speed comparable to a fairly fast iris with XZ graphics -- quite
respectable.  And Sun tells me that it's legal for us to give away copies
of geomview linked with their libraries, so we probably will have
binaries available.

As for getting Postscript versions of something you see in geomview,
it may be handiest to pick up a pre-release binary for geomview 1.6,
as it includes Tim Rowley's postscript saving facility (see the "Save" panel).
Note that this isn't guaranteed to do hidden-surface removal properly,
though it works in many situations.

You can get this binary from geom.umn.edu as
	priv/slevy/gvx-irix4-16b7.gz
To use it, decompress it with gzip -d, mark it executable with chmod +x,
and move the result in place of (whatever)/Geomview/bin/sgi/gvx.