Artifice, Inc.

Performance of QuickDraw 3D Rendering Engines

The following table compares the rendering performance of four available QuickDraw 3D rendering engines. All testing was done with DesignWorkshop Professional for Power Macintosh, which creates trimesh geometry for rendering to provide best QuickDraw 3D rendering performance.

Note that even for a given software application and model, many factors can affect rendering times, from main processor speed to memory configuration. Also note that simply counting geometries and textures provides only a crude measure of model "size", for instance because triangles can vary significantly in dimensions and overlapping, while textures can vary in data size and in how many times they are referenced. Still, these tests were performed with care, and they should provide a valid comparison of performance between the tested engines for the given real-world example models and views.

Rendering engine providers who would like their hardware benchmarked, and added to this comparison chart, are invited to contact Artifice Technical Support by sending e-mail to support@artifice.com.

QuickDraw 3D 1.5.4 Rendering Times* (in ticks**) with various Rendering Engines (smaller times are better)
Power Mac 8600/200 with Mac OS 8.1		Apple Software	Apple QD3D Board QuickDraw 3D 1.5.3	ATI Xclaim 3D Rage Pro chip, 8MB	MacPicasso 540 with 3D Overdrive 3Dfx chip, 8MB	iMac
Japanese Gate Trimeshes=39 Triangles=1604 Textures=0		16.5	5	2	3.1	3.4
Glass Pavilion Trimeshes=34 Triangles=620 Textures=7		15.6	6	2.8	3.7	3.0
Manhattan Walkthru Trimeshes=193 Triangles=2352 Textures=11		20	8.5	4	5.7	5.0
Maybeck Studio Trimeshes=235 Triangles=8622 Textures=20		30.9	14	8.6	12	10.5
Schroder House Trimeshes= Textures=		28.7	n/a	13.1	18.6	14.9
Davis House (Exterior) Trimeshes=2821 Textures=31		95.3	n/a	30.1	86.6	68.2
Davis House (Interior) Trimeshes=2821 Textures=31		61.5	n/a	31.1	28.3	23.4
Details, Drivers *most fractional times have been rounded upward **one tick equals 1/60th of a second Monitor color depth = 16 bits Monitor resolution = 1024x768 Rendering window size = 672x512		QuickDraw 3D IR v1.5.4 software only (DW 1.8.2)	Apple QD3D HW Driver v1.5.3, Apple QD3D HW Plug-In v1.5.3 (DW 1.7)	ATI 3D Accelerator v4.3.1, ATI Extension v2.0, ATI Graphics Accelerator v1.2.2, ATI Video Memory Manager v2.8, ATI YUV Acclerator v1.6.2 (DW 1.8.2)	3D Overdrive RAVE v1.1 3D Overdrive Glide v1.2.2 Best overall texture rendering quality. Best alpha textures when close, but not when far. (DW 1.8.2)	233 Mhz G3 96 MB RAM 6 MB VRAM ATI Rage IIc chip built-in Using included ATI drivers (DW 1.8.3)

Test models available on request. Please contact support@artifice.com.

Posted 97.08.22, rev. 98.08.17 · Support and Testing Team · Artifice, Inc.

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