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Your choice of a hardware platform will depend on the type
of application you are planning to support. For example, will end
users spend only a small amount of time creating a model, but spend
most of their time rotating objects and viewing them from different
directions? If so, the graphics hardware may be the more important
consideration. On the other hand, if the application is going to
solve complicated equations while rendering, the choice of CPU may
be more important to your application performance. Where to Get Information About HP Systems | |
Benchmarks and technical information about HP systems is published
in the Product Data Sheet for that system, which is available from
your sales representative. If you have access to World Wide Web,
you can also find much of this information by opening Hewlett Packard's
home page, at http://www.hp.com.
From the home page, you can access information about HP computers
and peripherals, support services, hints for troubleshooting problems
on HP systems and other timely information. Another source of news
about HP products is The Hewlett-Packard Journal. System Level Benchmarks | |
Several benchmarks are published about HP graphics systems
that should help you to determine if the system is an appropriate
choice for your application. Typical system data includes SPECint and SPECfp ratings, and Linpack and Dhrystone benchmark results. Graphics Benchmarks | |
The Graphics Performance Characterization committee (GPC)
provides a set of Picture Level Benchmarks (PLBs), which are a standardized,
vendor-independent measure of graphics performance. The benchmarks
are run from the PLB interpreter program, which executes a series
of graphics calls. A number of data sets, which contain graphics
calls that a typical application might make, are provided by the
GPC committee. For example, PLBWire93 is a good indicator of wireframe
application performance. PLBSurf94 is a good indicator of 3D shaded
surface performance. Xmark93 is a good indicator of how the user
interface will perform. Other published graphics data includes triangles/second, vectors/second
and quadrilaterals/second. This type of performance number is not
always available for a given device. Beware of these specifications,
because they rarely reflect actual performance of an application.
These benchmarks and PLBs are usually available on the Product Data
Sheet. Other information about GPCs is available in the GPC
Quarterly. You can receive copies of that publication
from university libraries, by subscription, or from a sales representative.
The GPC Quarterly is published by the National
Computer Graphics Association (NCGA), 2722 Merrilee Drive, Suite
200, Fairfax, VA 22031. Other Considerations | |
Other performance considerations for 3D graphics users include: Does the graphics system include a
hardware Z buffer? A hardware Z buffer is used to accelerate hidden
surface removal. If your application renders 3D solids or surfaces,
a hardware Z buffer will accelerate rendering and animation of complex
models. Is hardware double-buffering supported at the depth
your application needs? Double-buffering allows smooth movement
of dynamic images. To the human eye, double-buffered animation sequences
appear to run faster. Does the system include overlay planes? Running
the graphical user interface (GUI) in the overlay planes and the
graphics in the image planes can result in a substantial performance
improvement for some 3D applications. This is because exposure events,
caused by GUI interactions like pop-up menus, can force expensive
redrawing of the graphics images when the pop-up menus disappear. Is rasterization of primitives accelerated? If it
isn't, rendering times are strongly impacted by window sizes. How does the graphics system interact with the CPU?
If the graphics computations are done completely by the graphics
device, graphics performance will not scale with a faster CPU. If
the mathematical computations are done in the CPU, instead of by
specialized graphics hardware, graphics performance will scale with
CPU performance. Is texture mapping supported in hardware? Texture
mapping gives an application the ability to map a 2D image onto
a 3D surface for a more realistic rendering.
Software double-buffering, hidden surface removal and texture
mapping are supported on all HP graphics devices. However, hardware
support significantly improves performance for this functionality. |
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