ELSA GLoria II Quadro SDR

As one moves from simple flat shading to more complex shading and textures, the performance drops.  A test was performed on the GLoria II (Quadro) and GVX1 – AGP with tri-linear textures and one infinite light.  The GLperf script fragment was:

TriangleStripTest {

    (UserString printf("Triangle Strip (%s, 64x64 RGB trilinear modulated texture, smooth, 1 inf light)", ExecuteMode, Size))
    (ExecuteMode Immediate )
    (DepthTest GL_LEQUAL)
    (ObjsPerBeginEnd    4)
    (Size from 1 to 512 step 100%)
    (NormalData PerVertex)
    (TexTarget GL_TEXTURE_2D)
    (TexWidth 64)
    (TexHeight 64)
    (TexComps 3)
    (TexLOD 3)
    (TexMagFilter GL_LINEAR)
    (TexMinFilter GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR)
    (TexFunc GL_MODULATE)
    (NormalData PerVertex)
    (TexData PerVertex)
    (ShadeModel GL_SMOOTH)   
    (InfiniteLights 1)

}

The results are compared to the flat shaded performance in the following chart:

The peak triangle rates drop from about 9 million per second to a little over 3 million per second for the GLoria II!  The impact on the GVX1 performance was about a 40% reduction.

What performance does one need? Let’s suppose we wanted to spin smoothly (at 30 fps) a large flat shaded MCAD model (500,000 polys at 30 pixels per poly); this would require performance of 15 million polys per second at 30 pixels per triangle size.  The best card tested ( GLoria II Quadro SDR ) offers only about 18% of what is needed, so we some way to go in order to get the performance needed for this class of problem.