View Single Post
  #8  
Old 12-16-2002, 09:14 AM
clausb's Avatar
clausb clausb is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 1,168
May,

thanks for posting the results.

Your message reminded me that the SPEC organization maintains several very useful OpenGL benchmarks which can be helpful in determining the performance potential of a graphics card upfront.

SPECviewperf (http://www.spec.org/gpc/opc.static/opcview70.html) uses datasets from some CAD and rendering packages and displays/animates them using low-level OpenGL command sequences. Some of the tests used there can be misleading, though, since they focus on special display modes which are typically not used in CAD applications these days, such as wire mode, fully textured mode, or special modes which are only relevant in the particular application where the model originated from. Therefore, it is a good idea to read the detail descriptions of the tests in SPECviewperf and only pick the test results for comparison which also make sense for applications such as OSDM.

Another interesting set of benchmarks iis the family of SPECapc tests (http://www.spec.org/gpc/apc.static/apcfaq.htm). The tests are designed for a particular CAD or rendering application and run in the application itself. This means that you need to have the application in order to run the benchmark (just like for viewbench), which makes it harder to apply in practice, of course. On the other hand, these tests are a little more likely to reflect real-world performance.

In any case, perusing the results posted regularly to the SPEC web site can help tremendously to narrow down the choice and make a good and informed decision.

Claus

Last edited by clausb; 12-16-2002 at 09:34 AM.
Reply With Quote