Abstract: A graphics system enables an automatic choice between existing host rendering programs, existing hardware acceleration methods, and enhanced software acceleration programs for rendering graphic primitives. The graphics system accesses the speed and accuracy characterizations of a hardware accelerator attached to the system. Then, for each graphics primitive available from the enhanced software acceleration programs, the graphics system invention compares the speed and accuracy of the attached hardware accelerator with that of the enhanced software acceleration programs. The graphics system invention then selects which graphics primitives should be rendered by the enhanced software acceleration programs and which graphics primitives should be rendered by the attached hardware accelerator.

Abstract: A method for rendering two-dimensional shapes and two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional shapes on a projection plane uses a sorting table to determine which shapes overlap other shapes. For each two-dimensional shape, the shorting table includes an order attribute specifying the front to back ordering of the two-dimensional shapes on the projection plane. For each three-dimensional shape the sorting table includes a Z-value specifying a position along a coordinate perpendicular to the projection plane. The position specified is dependent on whether the three-dimensional shape is perceived to be in front of the projection plane or behind the projection plane. The values in the sorting table are sorted to produce a composite ordering of the shapes and a drawing is created by sequentially rendering each shape in the composite order of the sorting table to depict an overlapped appearance of the shapes.

Abstract: A method and system provides an object-oriented framework for rendering three-dimensional surfaces on a two-dimensional display in a flexible manner. The framework comprises two main classes that work together to render discretized data points that represent the three-dimensional graphic objects. The first class is used to construct a surface object which has a first member function that generates vertex information for each of the data points and stores the vertex information in a memory. The surface object also contains a second member function which generates indices into the stored vertex information which indices define shards on the surface which is being rendered. The second class is used to construct a rendering object which calls the first and second member functions in the surface object to first process the vertex data for display and then use the shard indices to retrieve the processed vertex data to render the surface.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for defining customizable pick, hit or find detection criteria for geometric types and using the results of the search as a basis for determining whether to perform an action. According to the inventive method, a search protocol is defined for geometric types. The search criteria is compared with graphic objects to determine whether the object matches the criteria. Based on the results of the comparison, an output is produced. In addition to allowing customized hit criteria for primitive geometric types, the hit object framework allows hit criteria to be specified for geometric types created by the application developer.

Abstract: An object-oriented graphic system is disclosed including a processor with an attached display, storage and object-oriented operating system. The graphic system builds a component object in the storage of the processor for managing graphic processing. The processor includes an object for connecting one or more graphic devices to various objects responsible for tasks such as graphic accelerators, frame buffers, page description languages and vector engines. The system is fully extensible and includes polymorphic processing built into each of the support objects.