Thank you all for the recommendations. I've been spending some time
reading through all of the old RTRT messages and in particular - Ingo
Wald's excellent papers!

Taking your advice, I'd like to write this to be as OS independent as
possible. Unfortunately, my computers are currently all running
Windows. It would make sense then for me to set up linux somewhere,
but I'm getting a bit out of my comfort zone here. I've done a lot
of unix coding in c, but it's mostly been database stuff. So with
that, I have a few more questions:

1) I've written graphics applications for DOS4GW & Windows (and some
other out of date operating systems) but never linux. I know that
even doing something as simple as setting up the resolution and
plotting a single pixel on the screen can be a difficult thing to
figure out when you are just getting familiar with doing graphics in
a new environment. Would anyone happen to have a silly little plot a
pixel program that runs in linux? (or know where I can find some
code that would help?)

2) If I were to consider purchasing a new machine for this (gotta
keep the cost low though), does it make sense to purchase one with
multiple processors? I've written a parallel ray tracer using an SGI
Origin so I know firsthand that you can get linear speedup with a
properly load balanced scene. I also found that implementing task
stealing continues this linear trend even with higher numbers of
processors (32). The reason I'm still asking this question is, if
the real bottleneck seems to be related to the memory fetches, and
I'm planning on using the SSE, would multiple processors still give
me a linear speedup on a shared memory architecture (the PC)?

3) Does the Intel compiler have a good IDE? (Is the Windows version
better/worse than linux for this?)

4) Is there a good profiler I can use with this? (Again, is the
Windows version better/worse?)

5) In general, for cross platform graphics development, what IS the
best OS to develop in?

Thanks again!

-Tom