3DLABS Oxygen 402 - Manual (Page 56)

50 Dynamic Pictures Oxygen 3D Family
Software Technical Overview
The Oxygen graphics accelerator card supports the Windows NT
operating system, accelerating 3D applications built on the OpenGL
application programming interface (API). OpenGL is the predominant
3D API in the technical computing community.
The software environment for the Oxygen card presents two APIs to
the applications programmer
−
WIN32 and OpenGL. WIN32 is the
Windows NT windowing API. Used together, OpenGL and WGL
provide a 3D programming interface. The OpenGL API supports the 3D
geometry and rendering pipelines, while the WGL API presents
interfaces that allow the OpenGL API to interact with the Windows
operating system.
Dynamic Pictures’ OpenGL implementation is supported through
Microsoft’s Installable Client Driver mechanism. By default, Microsoft
provides a software OpenGL implementation where all graphics
primitives are converted to 2D GDI calls. All 2D and 3D OpenGL
graphics requests are intercepted by Oxygen software drivers and
directed to the Oxygen card for dramatically accelerated performance.
Oxygen also includes support for Heidi, a graphics library used by
Kinetix 3D Studio MAX R1 and other Autodesk applications. If you are
a 3D Studio MAX R1 user, please refer to
Appendix B: Installing Your
Heidi Driver section on page 57.