In recent years there have been remarkable advances in the rendering of realistic imagery by sophisticated software running on ultra-high-performance compute engines. Technology now makes it possible to incorporate these exotic lighting, shading, and texturing processes into a true realtime computer image generation (CIG) system. This paper reports on work being done to combine advanced rendering algorithms and historical simulation capabilities into a new open system that provides the best of both worlds. Particular emphasis is given to improving edge quality, texture sharpness, lighting and shading flexibility, and the way both opaque and transparent surfaces interact in a dynamic visual scene. The system incorporates many new rendering capabilities that have never before been accelerated in hardware. Higher performance, lower development and recurring costs, and widely scaleable price and performance can be achieved through adoption of industry standards in processors, operating systems, and graphics application program interfaces (APIs). A modular approach allows system configurations for workstation or image generator applications.