@plot-paris said:
didn't know that. but just tried it out and you are right! wonderful!
another thought: we have to ask people who do the test to shut down all other software. otherwise the results may be influenced negatively...
[Edit] and yet another thought: does all the grafical calculations like styles and shadows solely depend on the gpu? meaning that the cpu only has to calculate any geometry modifications. can't you seperate the processes like this?
(sorry if this question sounds stupid. but I have no idea of how such things work... )
That's pretty much my understanding. I've been running my own benchmarks lately using a model I did that's 3.3MB. In the ruby console I run Test.time_display and it'll rotate around your model 360 degrees in exactly 72 frames. Afterwords it gives you a little report w/ some useful info. I'm finding it very handy to see exactly what kind of performance hits SU takes from tweaking various things (clock speed, resolution, hardware acceleration, fast feedback, anti-aliasing, etc.). I write down my settings and then run 4 tests (all 4 combos of textures on/off & shadows on/off).
I'm running on a 3.4Ghz Intel Pentium 4 HT w/ 2 gigs of RAM and an nVidia 8800GT graphics card at 1600x1200 resolution.
Here are just a couple results which should address your question.
Hardware Accel. turned ON in SU.
Textures: OFF
Shadows: OFF
23.3 frames/second
Textures: OFF
Shadows: ON
1.2 frames/second
Textures: ON
Shadows: OFF
18.6 frames/second
Textures: ON
Shadows: ON
1.1 frames/second
Hardware Accel. turned OFF in SU.
Textures: OFF
Shadows: OFF
7.2 frames/second
Textures: OFF
Shadows: ON
0.2 frames/second
At this point I stopped testing w/ hardware accel turned off because that last test took almost 7 minutes, whereas the other one's were either taking about 4 seconds (w/ shadows off) up to a minute (w/ shadows on).
Before doing this test I'd heard that the graphics card basically just does shadows and textures while the CPU does the geometry. Nevertheless, unless I'm missing something (?) the graphics card helps out a ton even w/o textures and shadows turned on.
-Brodie