Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU!mwm
From: mwm@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike  Meyer, My watch has windows)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: 3D
Message-ID: <8802142246.AA05430@violet.berkeley.edu>
Date: 15 Feb 88 00:56:27 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

>> For high-performance high-end graphics, particularly 3D,
>> programmability (which is what you seem to mean by "extensibility") is
>> totally inadequate.  You don't get performance by downloading a
>> program that implements a rendering pipeline, you get performance by
>> using the rendering hardware built into the server.  At a minimum,
>> this requires that additional "primitives" be added to your language
>> which cannot be written directly in that language.

This is why people doing number crunching on vector processors have to
add primitives to FORTRAN (and other languages) to get real
performance, right? :-)

I have no trouble at all picturing a graphics server (Postscript, or
whatever) that scans downloaded code for things that can benefit from
the graphics hardware on the machine, and then doing code translations
to do so.

	<mike