Early advances in real-time graphics hardware architecture were marked by sometimes novel, sometimes simply incremental ad hoc hardware implementations. More recently though, the field has matured to the extent that a widely-accepted architecture now works to clarify new hardware designs.

The OpenGL Graphics System provides a well-specified, broadly-applicable dataflow for real-time 3D graphics and imaging. Programmers view OpenGL as an Application Programming Interface (API), but in our view, OpenGL is an architecture; an OpenGL-capable computer is a hardware manifestation or implementation of that architecture. The Onyx ² InfiniteReality is a state-of-the-art, hardware-intensive implementation of OpenGL. This talk discusses the design of InfiniteReality from the perspective of how InfiniteReality manifests the OpenGL architecture.

While our focus is on a particular hardware-intensive implementation of OpenGL, we also discuss another recent implementation of the OpenGL architecture that is based on very different cost, functionality, and performance goals. The key observation is that real-time graphics hardware architecture has matured to a stage where a broadly-applicable and extensible architecture serves to clarify new graphics hardware designs even when motivated by very different design goals.