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Articles / TULARC / PC info / 3D Graphics Accelerators FAQ / |  |
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Q02 How does the performance of these cards compare to graphics workstations such as those produced by SGI, Sun, DEC, etc? |
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This item is from the PC 3D Graphics Accelerators FAQ, by Blair MacIntyre with numerous contributions by others. (v1.2).
This question is difficult to answer because there are so many factors affecting the overall 3D performance on a PC. Most importantly, while many of the boards listed below have impressive numbers in terms of maximum number of polygons/second, most only accelerate rendering. What this means is that you are still bounded by the speed at which your processor can transform a 3D data stream to a 2D perspective with lighting and material effects and then ship these numbers over the bus to the graphics card. So, the processor, processor speed, bus type and speed, software design, etc., all effect the final throughput. Thus, a board may perform differently on two different machines that have the same "specs" (ie. 90Mhz Pentium, PCI bus) if the bus was designed differently, or if there are other cards on the bus taking up bandwidth.
What is really needed is a set of comprehensive benchmarks that give some more realistic numbers about the various combinations of hardware. The NCGA (National Computer Graphics Association) GPC (Graphics Performance Committee) (comprised of the major vendors along with UNC and SDSC) is an organization primarily concerned with developing benchmark standards and performance characterizations for graphics hardware.
Check out http://sunsite.unc.edu/gpc/gpc.html for information about the GPC activities.
Unfortunately, the GPC Quarterly is about US$200/year, which is beyond my budget. Thus, to get their benchmark results, you'll have to talk to them. However, the benchmarking tool they use to measure OpenGL performance, called Viewperf, is available for free. From the README that comes with Viewperf:
What is this Thing Called 'Viewperf'. Rob Putney, OPC Vice Chairman 4/21/95
Viewperf is a portable OpenGL performance benchmark program written in C. It was developed by IBM. Viewperf provides a vast amount of flexibility in benchmarking OpenGL performance. At the current time, the program runs on most implementations of UNIX, Windows NT, and OS/2. The OpenGL Performance Characterization (OPC) Committee has endorsed Viewperf as its first OpenGL benchmark and results were first published using it in 4Q94 version of The GPC Quarterly.
OPC member companies have ported the Viewperf code to their operating system and window environments. The OPC Committee maintains a single source code version of the Viewperf code that is available to the public.
In future versions of this FAQ, performance measurements will be added in another section at the end. Stay tuned. If you have any measurements using Viewperf, please send them to me (bm@cs.columbia.edu)
Viewperf can currently be obtained from ftp://net1.uspro.fairfax.va.us/pub/gpc/opc/viewperf/
If that directory does not work, try looking on the OpenGL home page at http://www.sgi.com/Technology/openGL/opengl.html which should contain a pointer to ViewPerf.
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video, graphics, 3d, accelerator, PC components, hardware, faq, frequently asked questions, repair, computer
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