Halliburton’s GeoGraphix ‘value brand’ has been upgraded, leveraging Microsoft Direct-X graphics and GPU-based 3D scene rendering. Discovery 3D was on show at the SEG convention and included an intriguing ‘coal mine’ like display of the reservoir incorporating seismic data. But what attracted the crowds was the use of a Microsoft X-Box controller to navigate the 3D volume. Discovery 3D ‘makes high performance 3D visualization and interpretation tools accessible and affordable for all GeoGraphix users.’
GeoGraphix believes that younger geoscientists will ‘embrace and use this popular gaming technology.’
Under the hood of this new functionality is Direct3D, a component of Microsoft’s proprietary DirectX graphical API. Its latest manifestation, Direct3D 11 is a component of Windows 7 and introduces tessellation, GPU-based ‘multithreaded rendering’ and compute shaders. The latter, according to Wikipedia, ‘supports non-graphical tasks such as stream processing and physics acceleration’ and is ‘similar in spirit to OpenCL and Nvidia’s CUDA.’
Microsoft’s technology is potentially doubly disruptive, in terms of a possible displacement of the ubiquitous OpenGL and of Nvidia’s CUDA GPU-based number crunching. More from www.geographix.com.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.