The first product from Canon Inc’s British-born worldwide desktop software company Criterion Software Ltd is RenderWare, which is described as being based on the breakthrough three-dimensional graphics software technology from Canon. RenderWare is claimed to be the first interactive three-dimensional graphics application programming interface for Windows, providing three-dimensional graphics performance without the need for special graphics accelerators. Aimed at the multimedia market and totally software-based, it is claimed to give mid-range workstation performance from a 50MHz 80486 machine. It provides the developer with a device-independent three-dimensional object-based graphics programming interface consisting of a small number of object types and a set of associated functions, including advanced shading and texturing, Criterion says. It is available for the Macintosh and Unix and OS/2 systems as well as Windows, and since it is a software-only product, performance increases as the processor is upgraded. RenderWare software development kits, which the company said would not be announced in the UK until next month, are available immediately in the US at from $10,000, for the development library, debugging library, documentation, examples and demos. The initial version requires Windows 3.1 running on an 80386SX or better with 4Mb memory.
