Hp, Microsoft Tout Graphics Advance
Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp. were all set to unveil graphics software technology which they said boosts performance by 100 times over existing systems.
The technology will enable industrial designers display whole working parts of complex products, such as automobiles or aircraft, and manipulate them in real time.
Previously, this has been only possible on the most powerful, custom-made computing systems, but now it will be available on personal computers and engineering workstations.
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The complexity of an entire car is orders of magnitude beyond the complexity of a car door, for example, said Ted Wilson, research and development manager at Hewlett-Packards workstation division in Corvallis, Oregon.
The technology could help reduce the cost of sophisticated modeling techniques such as in aircraft design, where computer simulation design is a cost-effective replacement to building mockup models.
Wilson said the system, dubbed DirectModel and developed jointly by HP and Engineering Animation Inc. collaborative engineering projects to be carried out using a variety of systems.
Through a cross-licensing agreement, Microsoft will license DirectModel for integration into its DirectX multimedia framework and HP has licensed DirectX from Microsoft for use in its HP-UX system.
The agreements provides an industry standard for Unix and Microsoft Windows NT interoperability, and HP said it has chosen 3-D graphics tools and applications supplier Template Software Inc. to supply HP DirectModel for Unix platforms that compete with HPs HP-UX.
These include Unix from Digital Equipment Corp. International Business Machines Corp. Silicon Graphics Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc SUNW.
Mathew Rizai, chief executive officer of Engineering Animation, said work on the technology has been part of his companys initiative to handle particularly complex 3-D images.
The technology is also as a challenge to Silicon Graphics Inc.s OpenGL Optimizer programming interface, although Silicon Graphics said they supported efforts to extend and accelerate graphics performance.
John Shimph, a manager in the OpenGL group, said OpenGL Optimizer had been used to boost application performance by two to 10 times, and in some cases over 100 times.