http://www.sgi.com/tech/Performer/description.html (Silicon Surf Promotional CD, 01/1995)
"The Performer"
IRIS Performer is a software development environment that supports programmers implementing high performance graphics applications on Silicon Graphics products. It offers both high level facilities for visual simulation and virtual reality tasks and an application-neutral high-performance hardware-oriented graphics toolkit.
The outer application specific layer of IRIS Performer implements the tasks needed by visual simulation applications: it performs culling so that only potentially visible geometry is sent to the graphics hardware; it controls multiple display channels; it provides fast intersection tests with simulation databases; and most importantly, it orchestrates all of this in parallel with rendering on multiple processor IRIS systems.
The lower-level rendering portion of IRIS Performer is designed for maximum performance: its efficient data structures reflect the details of CPU, cache, and memory system architectures; its tuned rendering loops convert the system CPU into an optimized data movement engine; and its optimized state management system optimizes hardware utilization.
IRIS Performer provides a high-performance portability path across the Silicon Graphics product line. The low level library is implemented as a hardware-specific shared library, so applications based on IRIS Performer can achieve peak performance on graphics systems from Indy to RealityEngine2 without changes or recompilation.
The product includes a programmer's guide and printed man pages, as well as on-line man pages, test and demonstration programs, and complete real-time visual simulation applications. These applications are provided in source form as an examples of how to build real-time simulation systems using IRIS Performer.
And lastly, the distribution includes a wide variety of source code, demos, models, and utilities that have been provided by 3rd party vendors for your use. We call these vendors "friends of Performer" and we encourage you to sample their wares.
Compiled by: Allan Schaffer