SPEC Releases SPECviewperf 10

Category: Developers •

May 31, 2007

SPEC’s OpenGL Performance Characterization (SPECopc) project group has released SPECviewperf 10, a new version of its benchmarking software that adds performance measurement for full-scene anti-aliasing and multithreading. SPECviewperf 10 is available initially for Windows XP and Vista, with versions for Linux and Mac OS expected in upcoming months. Major new features in SPECviewperf 10 focus on performance evaluation in areas that are of increasing interest to the workstation market: higher-quality imaging and multi-core systems. SPECviewperf now provides the ability to compare performance of systems running in higher-quality graphics modes that use full-scene anti-aliasing. It also measures how effectively graphics subsystems scale when running multithreaded graphics content.

OpenGL 2.x and 3.0 APIs arrive this year

Category: General •

May 25, 2007

Longs Peak and Mount Evans represent major API upgrade. What is going on with OpenGL right now is very exciting. This year will see two new versions of this venerable API. The first version due in July 2007 is Longs Peak (OpenGL 2.x). This is a major clean-up of the code after almost a decade and a half. Approximately three months after that we will see the release of Mount Evans (OpenGL 3.0) which will run specifically on hardware born after November 8th, 2006. We are talking about DirectX 10-class hardware, bringing all the features of unified 3D architecture to the world of OpenGL. Mount Evans is compatible with Longs Peak, but you will require OpenGL 3.0 class hardware to run everything.

OpenGL 3.0 will offer features such as instanced rendering, stream out of vertex data to a buffer, texture buffer objects, numerous new texture formats and so on. Most importantly the Khronos Group is linking OpenGL and OpenGL ES, a mobile 3D graphics API via COLLADA and glFX, so what is supported in OpenGL 3.0 will see the light of the day in ES version as well.

OpenGL a growing concern

Category: General •

May 25, 2007

In an interview with Nvidia’s Roy ‘The Boy’ ‘Terrific’ Taylor, SplashDamage, developers of the upcoming FPS Quake Wars, let on that they think DX10 will get a run for its money. Since the Khronos Group took over the running of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board last Autumn, they have managed to get chip-makers like Nvidia to open up DX10-esque hardware features in the OpenGL system. “The extension mechanism has also allowed manufacturers of high end cards to gracefully expose DirectX 10 features on Windows XP,” Splash said. “OpenGL is still the only viable 3D solution for cross-platform development on the PC,” we are told, and that includes XP, Vista, Linux and OSX.

gDEBugger V3.1 Adds Support for Windows Vista™

Category: General • Developers •

May 24, 2007

gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, lets programmers see what is happening within the graphic system implementation to find bugs and optimize application performance. The new V3.1 Adds Support for debugging and profiling OpenGL applications on Windows Vista™. Also, gDEBugger OpenGL state variables Comparison Viewer now automatically compares all current state variables values to the OpenGL default render context values. This version also includes significant performance improvements.

OpenGL Performance: Perl vs Python, POGL vs SDL

Category: Developers •

May 23, 2007

Following their recent C vs Perl benchmarks, Graphcomp has just posted OpenGL benchmarks comparing Perl OpenGL (POGL) with Python’s PyOpenGL, and POGL with SDL::OpenGL.
Summary: POGL is over 20% faster than PyOpenGL in rendering vertex arrays, and over 60% faster than SDL::OpenGL when using POGL’s OpenGL::Array objects.
Review test data and download benchmark source at http://graphcomp.com/opengl/bench.html