Specification
Not unlike its Personal IRIS variant, IrisVision was capable of handling 8-bit and 24-bit raster images with a 24-bit Z buffer. The difference lay in that all this was integrated with a fifth generation Geometry Engine without having to upgrade the cards themselves. Around the same time, SGI was preparing to introduce the next series of graphics cards for their IRIS Indigo workstations, called "Express Graphics", which came in two variants for the Personal IRIS: Turbo Graphix and the Elan Graphics pipeline, both of them an evolution of IrisVision.
It came packaged with a proprietary 32-bit C compiler in order to take advantage of the 80386 and 80486's 32-bit extensions (at this time, SGI was moving forward to 64-bit microprocessors on their own platform). The PharLap 32-bit DOS-Extender was also packaged to further enable the use of large amounts of memory (up to 2 GB). Due to the nature of the pipeline, all execution calls to IRIS GL were displayed in fullscreen (MS-DOS could not display windows, so this left programmers with the freedom to write up their interface in pure IRIS GL).
Read more about this topic: Iris Vision