Summit Series has the industry's fastest 2D and 3D rendering available for UNIX/Linux systems. Both 2D and OpenGL operations are fully hardware accelerated, and compliant with the X Window System and OpenGL specifications, respectively.

Xi Graphics has developed its own high-performance hardware-accelerated OpenGL compliant pipeline that has been designed for stability and speed.

Summit Series X servers and graphics drivers conform to X11R6.4 of the X Window System specifications, which is the Industry Standard" for X. X.org and XFree86 X servers are free open source implementations of the same specifications; but even with hundreds of "contributors," the results are severly lacking for many applications.

The ability to drive two, three or even four displays with one graphics chip is called (by us) "DualView," "TripleView," and "QuadView," respectively.  The various displays can be set up in several configurations, including SLS (Xinerama).

Some graphics chips have hardware support for an image overlay plane, which allows 8-bit images to be displayed over a 24-bit image plane. This feature is often used by drafting/layout applications such as Cadence for higher performance.

Graphics chips which can drive two or more displays from a single chip are now quite popular. In UNIX, a single 'X screen' is normally allocated to each chip, but if the chip can now support two (or more) displays from the same FrameBuffer in the chip, Summit drivers can support two, three or four X screens per graphics chip, depending upon the output capability of the graphics card.

Summit Series graphics drivers support PCIe on a number of graphics cards/chips and platforms. PCIe is fast becoming popular with computer graphics - among other applications - because of its ability to move huge amounts of traffic across system busses, and from one system to another. Xi Graphics is working with one graphics hardware manufacturer to support high-performance graphics hardware that is remotely located with the LCD(s) instead of in the computer box . Fun.

The ability to "stretch" a single X screen over multiple graphics cards/chips is now available in the new Summit WallDisplay (HX) Series. This capability is in addition to the single chip version of SLS, and is targeted at commercial Wall Display applications. All monitor views are hardware accelerated.

The X Window System employs an X server that is between the graphics driver software and the OS kernel, and provides a number of functions that are found in other complete operating systems, such as Windows. In order to obtain the high quality required by Xi Graphics customers in the X servers, Xi Graphics developed its own implementation of X, and does use and X server code form XFree86 or X.org implementations of the X Window System.

Some systems require that the display(s) be rotated or "pivoted" 90 or 180 degrees to the "portrait mode," or "tablet mode," respectively. Unless this feature is implemented with hardware acceleration, heavy CPU usage results. Some Summit v2.x packages are available with the rotate feature, and the feature can be added to other drivers. Contact us with your requirements.

Linux and Solaris x86 OSs operating on 64-bit kernels are now supported in Summit WX Series. Contact us with your requirements and system configuration(s).

Summit graphics drivers support stereo on most graphics cards, even those that do not have the 3-pin stereo connector.

Graphics hardware that can support input video is supported in Summit Series. Image overlays and video overlays cannot be used simultaneously, however.

Some graphics cards have hardware that allows several computers, each with these graphics cards to be "chained" together and their displays synchronized across a very large matrix displaying a single 3D. We call it "3D Genlocked SLS," and it is available in Summit WX and CX Series.

Summit Series is licensed, closed source, proprietary software. Full-function demos are available for free download and testing on the target system to insure satisfaction prior to licensing. Then, licensing can be quickly accomplished on-line.

Even with Linux. The installation process moves aside the X server (either Linux or Solaris) and any XFree86 libs not desirable, and puts Accelerated-X packages in their place. Uninstall reverses the process.