More on 3D speed

Eric Ulevik eau at fast.fujitsu.com.au
Thu Oct 28 02:23:28 UTC 1999


From: Raab, Andreas <Andreas.Raab at disney.com>
> > A Java Quake level viewer worked OK on a P2/300 with the IE4 VM.
> Do you know what kind of 3D API this viewer used?! (probably D3D retained
> mode)

Software rendering. This was the impressive part.

> > If Squeak can use an external OpenGL library, then things are easy.
> Be precise - it might be easy but it is not necessarily fast. It is
amazing
> how slow some of the GL stuff is because people do not understand the
> tradeoffs (e.g., if you are using glVertex()/glTexCoord() to submit your
> vertices and attributes separately don't expect your stuff to be blazingly
> fast).

True - I should have said "requires less coding".

Making things fast always requires measurement. Intuition often fails.

In my current C++ project, we find that .c_str() is taking 70% of CPU in a
certain task. And there I was thinking that reading hundreds of data items
off a hard disk was going to be the bottleneck. Wrong again!

Regards,

Eric Ulevik





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