Silicon Graphics (SGI) is moving into the software market with the launch of a set of programs to help users interact with complex visual models in new ways, in some cases without having to buy the company's specialised hardware.

It is also announcing a technology for rendering complex graphic images with standard personal computers and servers, avoiding the need for special-purpose graphics chips, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The new offerings represent quite a departure for the troubled company, which has previously focused tightly on graphics hardware.

The company says its new Vue initiative is designed to solve problems associated with sending enormous graphics files electronically. Remotevue uses centralised servers connected to the internet to create 3-D images which can then be viewed and manipulated remotely from a laptop of other portable device.

Two other programs, Softvue and Powervue, allow arrays of standard x86 computers to work together to handle graphics rendering without the expense of adding cards containing GPU chips.The company says that some users have sets of data that are much too large to fit into the memory chips on GPU cards, but that the new software makes it feasible to shift graphics tasks to general-purpose memory chips.

The company plans a gradual rollout for the software over the next year or so, and has not yet established pricing. X