A high-throughput graphics library designed for a portable molecular structure viewer

We have equipped our graphics library with efficient functions so that a molecular structure viewer program can provide both portability and high-throughput rendering without hardware acceleration. The library renders graphics primitives into off-screen image memory with novel functions such as a point list for the vertices of three-dimensional graphical primitives, scan conversions of sphere and cylinder primitives, and z-buffered bit-block transfer. A molecular structure viewer program was implemented with the graphics library, giving reasonable rendering performance on conventional UNIX workstations with the X-Window system. The use of dynamic linking also lends a flexible extension facility to this software system. An advanced polygon renderer can be provided as an plug-in style extension module as well as other functional modules that are specific to the application program. The design of our graphics library is not only effective in molecular graphics but is also applicable for general three-dimensional graphics software systems.