SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR THE COORDINATED SIMPLIFICATION OF SURFACE AND WIRE-FRAME DESCRIPTIONS OF A GEOMETRIC MODEL

A system simplifies a geometric model to accelerate the rendering of the geometric model. A surface description of the geometric model is stored in one or more of the system memories. A wire-frame description of the geometric model is also stored. A surface simplification process alters the surface description to create an approximation of the original surface description. A wire-frame draping process drapes the wire-frame description onto the simplified surface and simplifies one or more of the line segments that are draped, the simplified line segments and the simplified surface description are rendered onto a display device.