Modular composing high-performance real-time rendering software

Fast visualisation of a realistic 3D graphics environment is necessary for hypermedia and virtual reality systems. As a rule, powerful hardware is used for this purpose. This paper presents an approach to achieve a high graphics performance on a plain IBM PC; a performance which is comparable to that of powerful workstations for a wide class of applications. Two components of the approach are described: maximum speeding-up of each step of graphics engine pipeline and modular assembly of rendering system for the particular application. We implemented the approach in an authoring toolkit, Virtual Space, which has been used for developing vehicle trainers. The facilities of one of them, marine trainer SmallCaptain, are described.