Wow III

This is a computation and graphics demo that we programmed for SGI for the launch of their Prism™ line of computers.

Wow III is designed to accomplish two main goals. The first is to take advantage of multiple processors inside Prism™'s shared memory architecture to efficiently compute fluid flow and create a dynamic water surface. The second is to render the computed scene with the highest possible visual quality using Prism's graphics hardware and shaders.

The water simulation is built with our in-house metaballs engine, Aqua, which can distribute its surface computations across many threads. Since Prism™ machines can have varying numbers of processors, we make sure to keep them all working hard on water surface calculations. The larger the machine, the smoother the water animation will appear.

Prism employs graphics hardware that supports all the latest OpenGL features, which we used to add rendering effects not seen in older SGI demos. Click on the screenshots to see our per-pixel shading, dot-3 bump mapping, light bloom, and specialized water rendering with reflection and refraction.